After controversy, Vine makes porn harder to find

Twitter-owned video-sharing app Vine is taking steps to curb access to porn after it attracted a lot of unwanted criticism this morning for placing a hardcore porn video at the top of every user’s feed.

After a few hours with the video up and collecting a great deal of negative feedback, Vine removed the offending clip, and a Twitter spokesperson apologized for the “human error.”

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake, we removed the video immediately,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat earlier today. “We apologize to our users for the error.”

But now the service is doing more than just being more careful about its Editors Pick’s. Vine now blocks many searches for tags that might lead to pornographic videos, such as #porn, #boobs, #sex, and #booty. Searching for those terms brings nothing up inside the popular app.

While tags such as #nsfw and #pornvine are still searchable, it at least looks like Vine is beginning to take steps to make sure Apple doesn’t remove Vine from the App Store, like it did with 500px for pornographic images. Apple did, however, remove Vine from its list of Editor’s Picks today.

Vine was launched last week by Twitter and has attracted a lot of fans among the tech-enthusiast crowd. We’ll see if that enthusiasm holds up after this controversy.

Check out how some common Vine searches look now below:

Woman with eyes covered via MarcusVDT/Shutterstock