According to the folks at Twitter, an innocent "human error" was to blame when a pornographic video was featured as an "Editor's Pick" on Vine, but this incident — combined with a lack of privacy and abuse prevention controls — makes it seem as if there's a bit of a porn problem on the new video-sharing service.
The sudden censorship of certain hashtags further solidifies that belief.
The Verge's Nathan Ingraham was among the first to point out that it appears that the searches for certain naughty hashtags — such as #porn, #sex, #booty and similar — are bringing up no results, even though there are certainly posts with those hashtags.
I tested this claim by creating a post and tagging it #nsfw. Nothing prevented me from creating this post — which was entirely innocent, don't worry — but neither tapping on the hyperlinked hashtag nor searching for #nsfw brought it (or any other posts) into view. Instead, I was shown a frowning emoticon and told that Vine couldn't load any posts. (In the case of searches, the frowning emoticon informed me that no tags matching that term exist.)
We have reached out to Twitter to inquire about the missing search results and to see if some sort of cleanup is occurring behind the scenes. "We're in the process of changing how users find and view sensitive content," a spokesperson explained. "We're experimenting with a number of approaches and will continue to iterate."
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