Porn actresses line-up at the opening of the ''Venus'' erotic fair in Berlin October 17, 2013.
Porn actresses line-up at the opening of the ''Venus'' erotic fair in Berlin October 17, 2013. Reuters

YouTube/Braehawk Tech

Is Vine adopting the oft-repeated line of porn stars that they are not disrobing to arouse, but for the sake of art?

In spite of the Vine prohibition on porn content, the video-sharing site said it would still allow nudity if it is for educational use. But who will determine what is lewd and what is educational?

On one hand, Vine defines porn as "depictions of sex acts, nudity that us sexually provocative or in a sexual context, and graphic depictions of sexual arousal."

On the other hand, it defines acceptable forms of nudity as "depictions of nudity of partial nudity that are primarily documentary, educational or artistic in nature."

YouTube/Mark de Roo

It gave as an example the clothes-less photo of John Lennon curled beside a clothes Yoko Ono as artistic nudity and photos takes at a strip club as pornography.

Other images considered okay by Vine are docu footage of aboriginal women who are topless, mothers breastfeeding their babies, people protesting in the nude and partially nude models. It compared its guidelines of what is allowable to similar benchmarks on PG-13 videos or even tastefully done R-Rated movies.

Vine said the new rules do not really change anything for 99 per cent of their users. The video-sharing site added, "For the rest, we don't have a problem with explicit sexual content on the Internet - we just prefer not to be the source of it."

The change in policy comes 14 months after Vine's launch in January 2013, after which sexually explicit and lewd clips started to appear on the site. With the new policy, Vine gave users who have uploaded porn content to take them down or download the content using a newly created tool.

The high level of explicit content on Vine also promoted the raising of the original minimum age to sign up for an account to 17 from 12.