So, Twitter’s new social video app, Vine is being used to post porn. Considering Apple’s stance on porn and the App Store, [1] and their tight relationship with Twitter, this is cause for consternation. Should they pull this high-profile app by their partner from the store, like they’ve done with similar apps by developers with less ties? What can be done?

In all honesty, not much.

First off, a service like Vine is going to get people using it to do dirty things. It’s the nature of the beast. Porn and the Internet are close bedfellows. Porn was traded by BBS, and on Usenet, well before the web was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. When you hand a user a camera, give them an audience, and say “go nuts,” you’re very likely to see someone’s nuts. It’s an unfortunate fact of life. You can’t tell me that someone at Twitter or Vine didn’t ask “Hey, what if someone posts six seconds of their genitals on here?” If you are of the opinion that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then this whole flap is clearly a way for Twitter to get more adoption on Vine. This is step one. Step three is, of course, profit. They may have seen this coming.

Having tried the app, I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. Vine drops you in the middle of a public timeline of videos, with audio, that automatically starts playing. This, alone, makes me think they didn’t think this through. I know it’s a social video app, but you don’t start playing stuff, with audio, without a user asking you to. Also, by dumping you into a public stream, you don’t know what to expect. If someone at Twitter/Vine thought for a moment, they’d seed the service with a few good users from a beta, suggest people to follow, and make damn sure nobody sees something on the main stream that they didn’t ask to see. You can leave the porn tucked away in a search. (The search sucks too, by the way.) The whole porn on Vine foofaraw is just bad social design being exploited by the sort of people who would exploit any bad social design to show their naughty bits. You’d think Twitter would have figured that part out by now.

But then, you don’t get the buzz of “Hey! There’s naked people on this app!”

As for Apple, where does this leave them? Vine’s no different than Instagram when it comes to access to body parts, it’s just that they move on Vine. A simple “are you eighteen or older” verification dialogue, as gets slapped on any app that accesses the open web, would easily solve this from Apple’s end. As for those who make a fuss over Apple’s unwillingness to have porn in the App Store, their complaints carry very little weight when users have a preinstalled app that can view all the porn they’ve ever dreamed of. It’s called Safari. I doubt Apple’s going to take that off any time soon.