How to stop young kids watching unsuitable videos on Vine

Twitter has launched a version of its Vine video app targeted specifically at young children, in a bid to prevent them watching unsuitable content. Vine lets users share short videos of six seconds or less, often hastily chopped together on their smartphones. 

It’s frequently used to share clips of football goals, people falling off logs and other such gubbins, but there is of course the risk that this “user-generated content” will contain foul language, nudity and other material that you wouldn’t want the bratlings watching, so Twitter has moved to release a sanitised version of the app.

Called Vine for Kids, the app is initally iPhone only, and features “hand-selected” videos that are deemed appropriate for younger viewers. With the kiddie-friendly clips presented using cartoon characters, it might not appeal to an iPhone-toting teenager, but this app is clearly aimed at parents who use a smartphone to stop the kids screaming in restaurants. 

“The idea came about during an office conversation in early January,” reads a post by Carolyn Penner, the company’s head of communications, on the Vine blog. “One of my colleagues was talking about how much his two-year-old daughter loves Vine – he said he wished there was a separate app she could use to more easily watch posts that are appropriate for kids. That week happened to be Hack Week, a time when we get to work on projects outside of our day-to-day work. So two folks teamed up and built exactly that.”

Our brief tests with the free app produced a selection of clips showing nothing more offensive than caterpillars, Elmo and animated characters of eggshells, and kids can move to the next video by simply swiping to the left.