Porn, Cute Cat Videos Take Over Twitter As Popular Vine App Provides Insight Into Social Media Psyche

It’s been said that the Internet has provided an uncensored view of the human mind. We’re now able to track what terms are searched for the most, which websites receive the most traffic and, consequently, what people are interested in when no one else is watching.

By that logic it shouldn’t be surprising that the two most popular subjects on Vine, the new video-sharing service on Twitter, are cats and porn. The new app allows users to record and post looping six-second videos, with Twitter executives explaining the short duration with the same theory that applies to the 140-character limit on tweets: It forces creativity.

Vine quickly entered the top 10 free app listing on iTunes with more than twice as many subscribers as SocialCam, the runner-up. Not surprisingly, with all those downloads comes a lot of nudity and yawning kittens.

Vine's Terms of Service explain that users are responsible for the content they post, and any video reported as inappropriate is shielded by a warning page before the play button is available. The company first advertised Vine as an app that was free of censorship but after just a week began blocking search terms like “sex” and “NSFW” to help combat the proliferation of sexual content.

Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon reported that, tracking the rise of amateur and GIF pornography, new websites have already sprouted compiling the most nefarious Vine content. “It should come as no surprise, I suppose, that as our thoughts are distilled into 140 characters, our porn is similarly reduced to 256 colors,” she wrote, before relaying a conversation with adult film star Kimberly Kane.

“I think people, me included, have shorter attention spans because of the 24-hour information overload we are subjected to every time we turn on the TV or go online,” Kane said. “GIFs boil sexuality down into a visual tweet, focusing on the exact moments of sex I want to see on repeat.”

So far the same goes for the six-second video, but not all of them are X-rated. While some people create web pages depicting illicit sexual situations, others devote sites to cute, cuddly kittens that’d melt the heart of even the most disgusting perverts.

The creators of Vinecats.com explained their site with, “All videos are being pulled from Twitter and Vine in real time. We take no responsibility for non-cat imagery or videos that are less than purr-fect…We have a soft spot for cat videos, just like everyone else.”