The Secret Porn of Vine

It’s there — you just need to know where to look

When video sharing app Vine became popular earlier this year, the internet was flooded with rumors that it was rife with porn. As something of an adult content expert, I deemed it my duty to learn more about the topic. So I installed Vine on my phone, surfed to the #nsfw tag page, and, sure enough, there it was: lots and lots of porn. Short videos of penises, breasts, masturbation, sex. It was a cornucopia of amateur porn micromovies.

But a few days later, when I went back to check again, the entire page was blank. I figured that was the end of it. Like so many internet services before it, Vine had realized that if you build it, they will porn; and with one fell swoop, they’d eliminated any and all traces of anything adult.

How wrong I was. Over the summer, while having drinks with a friend, the conversation turned to Vine. My friend confessed that Vine porn was something of a guilty pleasure.

“Vine porn? I thought Vine banned porn,” I responded. Oh no, I was told. Porn was still very much a part of Vine. You just had to know how to find it.

That blanked out #nsfw page? That was just a sign that Vine had blocked that specific tag, making it more difficult for the lazier perverts among us to immediately find the dirtier side of the service. But the dedicated exhbitionists of Vine had figured out ways to tag their contributions to fly under the radar of censorship. Try #pu55y, I was told, or #a55. #vineafterdark was a popular one too.

In the months since I was told about this trick, all of the above tags have been banned from Vine. But the adult content rages on. You may not be able to find #vineafterdark, but with a casual misspelling or two, you’ll probably land on what you’re looking for. #pu55y has dropped a few letters and reemerged anew; #a55 has transformed by adding in descriptors that specify what sort of #a55, specifically, is on display. By the time you read this piece, the tag pages I looked at last night may be blocked — but chances are good that Vine’s XXX enthusiasts will have figured out new, more elaborate ways to flash under the radar. In the elaborate game of Whack A Mole that exists between Vine’s censors and adult content, the adult content seems to be winning.

What can I say? Porn will find a way.