Twitter Vine Censorship and 500px is Back: Apple's Great Porn Compromise of 2013

A couple of days ago, the world discovered that Twitter Vine (and any other video sharing service) can be used to show mature content (i.e., "the internet is for porn"). When that happened, I wondered out loud if Apple would have to ban the popular new app, in order to be consistent with its anti-porn policy, which saw the demise of photography sharing app 500px just a week before.

Apple has found a consistent option, which involves un-banning 500px and not (of course not) banning the new video-sharing app or Twitter. Call it "Apple's Great Porn Compromise of 2013."

Yesterday, Apple signaled that it has decided to act in a manner that treats both apps similarly, by allowing 500px back into the iTunes App Store, labeling the app with a 17+ tag. The app now has a "Report Photo" option, which Vine says its users can do in its terms of service. At the same time, Twitter is quietly exploring options to limit #nsfw and #porn searches and sharing on its service, perhaps because Vine embarrassingly confirmed internet buzz about porn on their video-sharing service by putting a porn video on its Editors' Picks list (and perhaps, to please Apple). 

While the age restriction labels isn't something that 500px can be happy about - it affects apps the way it affects movies - they must certainly be glad to be back from their shunning. By the way, according to Tech Crunch, Oleg Gutsol, co-founder of 500px, has said that 500px did an internal audit of the content being shared on the app, and have found zero pornographic images,

When it comes to Twitter, until now the most outspoken social network against censorship, a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable, "We're in the process of changing how users find and view sensitive content. We're experimenting with a number of approaches and will continue to iterate." So far, that means messing with the results you might get from a hashtag search, but we'll see how serious Twitter is about holding back possibly offensive content, several iterations down the road.