Vine, Twitter’s new experiment in oddball video sharing, gave users a spook this morning: a video of a guy and a sex toy. Even more startling, it was the app’s top “Editor’s Pick”. What? How? Why?
We can’t answer that last question, but we have a better idea of how, according to a Twitter spokesperson:
A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realising this mistake we removed the video immediately. We apologise to our users for the error.
So we can be clear about one thing: this wasn’t the fault of some rogue algorithm. A human being, it would seem, actually selected a video titled “dildoplay” as the number one editor’s pick (though it was quickly removed). The best Vine on Vine was briefly extremely vivid porn — literally, an editor’s pick.
Vine still doesn’t make any sense as a porn destination, but if the app has the kind of editorial oversight that lets a massively NSFW clip turn into top suggested viewing, it’s going to alienate people in a hurry. As of this morning, it probably already did.