The video-sharing application Vine – which has some 40 million users – has banned pornography and sexually provocative images.
Vine, which is owned by Twitter, said anyone who breaches the new rules could have their account suspended until they delete the content.
Twitter said sex acts, sexually provocative images such as those showing strip clubs, and animation that is sexually graphic are not allowed.
Change
Vine – which allows users to post six second videos online – said there are “a very small percentage of videos that are not a good fit for our community”.
“For more than 99 percent of our users, this doesn’t really change anything”, it commented.
Twitter bought Vine in 2012 and last year 40 million people were signed up to the app.
Report
Stating the change in a blog post, Vine said users who think a video goes against the new policy can report it to moderators.
In a statement Twitter said: “We’re notifying users who have posted explicit sexual content in the past that they have a period to either take down or download their existing content using a new tool we’ve created”.
When Vine was launched twelve-year-olds could download it, but the age limit was raised to 17 soon after, partly because of the amount of explicit content available.
At present the Apple App Store says that Vine contains “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity”, as well as “Infrequent/Mild Profanity”.
Saturated
Last year a newspaper commentator warned about the effect of children seeing online pornography.
Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson said, “as a society we really do need to teach children a healthy, emotionally connected view of sexuality that has nothing to do with the porn version that has saturated their parallel world”.