Vine announced that it will ban pornographic content from its video-sharing app, but will continue to allow artistic nudity as well as nudity for documentary or educational use. The boundary between pornographic nudity and artistic nudity has always been a bit of a gray area. Many users are asking Vine: Where do you draw the line?
Vine's new policy defines pornographic and therefore banned content as "depictions of sex acts, nudity that is sexually provocative or in a sexual context, and graphic depictions of sexual arousal." Meanwhile, acceptable forms of nudity include "depictions of nudity or partial nudity that are primarily documentary, educational or artistic in nature."
So, for example, that iconic picture of Yoko Ono fully clothed with John Lennon curled up in the nude beside her? Artistic nudity. The video you took at a strip club? Pornography.
Documentary footage of tribal women baring their breasts, women breast-feeding infants, nude protesters, partially nude models and other similar content falls under the umbrella of nudity intended for educational use. Vine's restrictions are sort of like the ones on TV. Vine will let you see all the PG-13 stuff you want and some of the tasteful R-rated stuff, but the XXX-rated stuff and other late-night TV-inspired content is strictly off-limits.
"As we've watched the community and your creativity grow and evolve, we've found that there's a very small percentage of videos that are not a good fit for our community," Vine wrote in a post, announcing the new rules.
"For more than 99 percent of our users, this doesn't really change anything," Vine wrote. "For the rest: we don't have a problem with explicit sexual content on the Internet - we just prefer not to be the source of it."
The easy availability of sexually explicit content on Vine has been a concern for quite some time. Initially, Vine was open to everyone 12 and up, but recently, Vine restricted its services to those 17 and older. Still, it is very easy to fake birth dates or to simply watch inappropriate content on someone else's device. Vine's new policy aims to shut down these loopholes and ensure that none of the videos posted on the app are inappropriate.
Of course, the question of what types of nudity are appropriate and which are not, is the most difficult thing to pin down. Vine's policy will make the average parent happy, but it will not satisfy everyone, nor will it be able to guarantee that no pornographic content gets past its radar. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and other social networks have also struggled with the same issue. Even doing a standard image search on Google or Flickr often turns up nudity and slightly pornographic images.
Still, Vine is at least making an effort with its new policy. Vine will ban users who break the rule until they remove the offending post. Twitter, which owns VIne, stated that it has created a tool to help those who have posted porn in the past will be able to easily take it down from Vine.
