If you didn't think a teen making savory love to a Hot Pocket would have a lasting effect on the Internet, you were mistaken, my friend. On Vine, the six-second video service, the porn days are over.
The Twitter-owned app updated its rules to prohibit sexually explicit material, and the Web how has one fewer place to watch people rub their naked bodies together. @VERSACEPOPTARTS will likely be among the last to bang anything on Vine.
Vine users are no longer able to post sex acts performed alone or with another person, including acts involving sex toys. “Sexually provocative” nudity is out, although suggestive dancing is still allowed if the dancer is clothed. Strip club Vines are a no-go. And even art and animation that is sexually graphic is now off-limits; the new rules specifically mention hentai, which is a subgenre of Japanese manga and anime that revolves around sexually graphic situations.
Nudity for artistic purposes is still OK, though, as are vines of women breastfeeding their children.
Vine users who have already posted sexually explicit content are receiving notifications to bring their accounts into compliance with the new rules. Those who don’t will be suspended. Viners who see sexually explicit content will be able to report it, but Twitter told ZDNet that these flagged accounts will be reviewed by employees, and that there is no automatic banning process.
"We're notifying users who have posted explicit sexual content in the past that they have a period to either take down or download their existing content using a new tool we've created," a Twitter spokesperson told CNN.
This is sure to upset Vine’s porn community. In early 2013, Vine started censoring porn-related hashtags in an effort to make the app more family-and-Apple friendly (Apple kicked Vine out of the App Store after too much explicit material surfaced on the app). But until now, explicit posts were allowed to stay up, even though they couldn’t be hashtagged.
H/T ZDNet | Photo via Flickr/Esther Vargas (CC BY-SA 2.0)
