On Sunday, a number of news outlets ran stories covering the rise of easily-accessible pornography on the new video sharing app Vine, causing a firestorm of debate online. The New York Times' Nick Bilton tweeted that pornographic material was discoverable thanks to simple hashtags such as #porn.

VINE DOESN'T HAVE A PORN PROBLEM — APPLE HAS A POLICY PROBLEM

But the truth is that Vine doesn't have a problem with porn, at least not one that isn't shared by any other social media app. Apple has a problem, its App Store's puritanical, unevenly-enforced policies for adult content. Vine is just today's example.

The Twitter-owned app and service launched last week to much fanfare, mostly due to its ingenious editing functions, which allow users to stop and start a video recording. Vine is also notable as one of Twitter's first major departures from its core social networking business. The iOS-only app was prominently featured by Apple as an "Editor's Pick" in its App Store the day it launched.

The news that pornography or nudity would find its way into a popular social app, which is focused on image or video sharing, takes a backseat to the larger question of how Apple will handle this flare-up. Recently the company pulled a popular photo sharing application from its App Store called 500px citing the discovery of "pornographic images and material." Apple offered this statement:

A cursory search of #porn and related hashtags within the Twitter iOS app unearths a cornucopia of adult material, yet Apple has taken no action in the case of that app. The existence of pornography on Twitter and in similar apps is also not a recent occurrence — Twitter in particular has long been used for such sharing. Yet Apple has made much out of its tight partnership with Twitter, adding native Twitter functionality into iOS as part of a recent update to the software.

The situation draws even more attention to the vague and sometimes confusing rules of Apple's App Store guidelines, and more clearly showcases the sporadic and often unusual criteria the iPhone-maker uses to decide the fates of applications.

We've reached out to Apple and Twitter for comment, and will update the post with more information as we get it.

Rather than isolating them to a spam folder, Apple is deleting any trace of emails received by iCloud users that contain the phrase "barely legal teen." Reports of the odd situation have surfaced lately and The Verge is able to confirm firsthand that messages including the text (either in subject or the email's body) are disappearing. Apple is also erasing any emails sent from an iCloud email address that contain the three words in succession. Bizarrely, changing "teen" to "teens" is all it takes for a message to get through successfully.

Back in November, InfoWorld reported that users were observing similar behavior when email attachments included the trigger phrase. Apple now appears to be screening plain-text messages for the words. We've also tested a number of other phrases and found that nearly any other vulgarity could be sent without issue. Thus we're not sure if what we're seeing is intentional on Apple's part or merely a bug, but it's important to note such actions are permitted under Apple's Terms of Service:
Is Apple — no stranger to porn controversies — quietly enforcing censorship, or is this instead the result of an overzealous spam filter built into iCloud? We've reached out to Apple for more details on the matter and will report back should the company respond.