Microsoft pulls part of Kin campaign after ‘sexting’ complaints

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Microsoft is saying no to ‘sexting.’

As part of the launch of its new, mostly kid-oriented Kin phones, Microsoft posted a video depicting young people rocking out at a music club -- including a scene of a young man peeling off from the crowd to take a cellphone photo of what was inside his shirt.

A blog post on the Consumer Reports website asked whether the ad was promoting sexting -- or the sending of suggestive text and photo messages. Though the actors in the ad appear to be college-age or older, the phones are generally aimed at the younger set, for whom sexting can mean more serious trouble.

But now the company has said it will delete the part of the video in question.

‘Microsoft has deleted the inappropriate portion of the Kin video. We take sexting very seriously, & are sorry it happened,’ it said in a tweet to Common Sense Media, an industry watchdog that objected to what it saw as an implicit endorsement of the practice.

The video was still visible on the kin.com site as of this writing, but apparently it will take a while for servers to process the deletion.

-- David Sarno

Image is a screen capture from Microsoft’s Kin site.