Vimeo Scrambles to Fix ‘Internal Processes’ After Threats to Staff Picks’ Curatorial Independence

Vimeo said mistakes were made in its “rushed” response to child protection laws, but concerns about the Staff Picks curation team’s independence linger. 

Kara Grace Miller’s short documentary “My Neighbor’s Yard” was set to make its online debut November 4, 2025 — Election Day — via Vimeo Staff Picks, long known as the premier online platform for festival-quality shorts. Rather than a lengthy festival run, Miller wanted maximum eyeballs on the film about how politically divided neighbors in her hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, used their front yards to campaign during the 2024 presidential election.

And then, on October 24, Staff Picks suddenly rescinded its invitation due to “political content.”

Three weeks prior, on October 1, Phoebe Hart’s “Bug Diner” made its Staff Picks debut — only to be pulled two days later. The stop-motion animated short previously won five Oscar-qualifying festivals, including the Sundance and SXSW Jury Prizes. No formal explanation was offered to Hart at the time, but IndieWire can confirm it was a decision made by Vimeo’s Legal and Trust & Safety teams due to its sexual content. (You can watch “My Neighbor’s Yard” here and “Bug Diner” here.)

The Staff Pick logo looks like a prestigious film festival laurel and has come to stand for a trusted curatorial brand. Not only can it drive tens of thousands of views to an indie short, but those views come from within the creative and filmmaking communities that matter. Among its thousands of selections since 2008, it’s played a key role in the careers of filmmakers like Kogonada, The Daniels, Alan Yang, and David Lowery.

“My Neighbor’s Yard” producer Andrew Wonder has three Staff Picks to his credit and believes he owes much of his career to the platform. His first Pick came 14 years ago with “Undercity,” a short documentary about the tunnels beneath New York City, and it “changed the course of my career,” he said.

“The press I got, the features in the [New York] Times and Wired,” he said. “I was on ‘The Today Show.’ Vimeo got me so much closer to my audience, to my peers, to the people I’m meeting at the film festivals, to the community that I feel like I represent and I communicate with as a creator, and so that’s why I’ve always held it as a sacred place.”

Vimeo’s Staff Picks are unique in the online ecosystem. Ad-free and with no paywall or major media conglomerate backing, it’s funded largely by users; Vimeo’s top revenue source remains the subscribers who use Vimeo as a professional tool to host, share, and submit their work to film festivals and clients. Combined with a curation team that filmmakers believe represents the values of their creative community, it has for years filled the online gap between festivals and the audience.

Sources said Staff Picks’ four-person curation team, led by longtime members Meghan Oretsky and Ina Pira, was alarmed by the interference. Until then, the only limits on their selections were Vimeo’s standard terms of service, which prohibit content that incites violence or qualifies as pornographic. Over a three-week period in October, however, Vimeo’s Legal and Trust & Safety teams rescinded invitations for “Bug Diner,” “My Neighbor’s Yard,” and four more shorts. The curation team strongly disagreed with those decisions and unsuccessfully appealed them, as they made clear in an apologetic email to Miller.

“[Vimeo’s Legal and Trust & Safety teams] are taking a conservative approach that the curation team does not agree with and we’re still working on our response,” wrote a member of the Staff Picks curation team to Miller. “We’ve been fighting with them over sexual content on the platform but this escalation to censor political content is an unsettling development that we find unacceptable.”

Lost on no one involved was that on September 10, Vimeo entered a definitive agreement to be acquired for $1.38 billion by Bending Spoons, a Milan-based tech company that also owns AOL, Brightcove, Evernote, and WeTransfer. The sale occurred on the same day as right-wing political activist and media personality Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a moment that cast a chill over political speech in corporate media.

According to Vimeo, however, this was not a top-down problem. In fact, only with IndieWire’s inquiry weeks later did CEO Phillip Moyer learn there was a problem.

Responding to IndieWire, Vimeo said neither its acquisition nor the political environment played a role in rejecting the Staff Picks selections. In a detailed on-the-record interview, Moyer said it wasn’t censorship, but a mistake due to “a failure of our internal processes and a failure of an appeal process.” Vimeo declined to make anyone from Staff Picks curation team available for comment.

According to Moyer, at issue is 22 child protection regulations implemented between November 2023 and November 2025, including Florida HB 3, New York SAFE for Kids Act, Texas SCOPE Act, Ohio Parental-Consent Law, as well as online safety acts passed in the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, and Turkey.

“We’ve been working tirelessly to try to make sure that we are in compliance with literally dozens of regulations that keep coming out around child safety,” he said.

Vimeo was challenged by finding an efficient process to ensure that all 10 billion minutes of video it hosts are compliant with the new regulations. Moyer said the process of first using technology, then humans, to scan and flag potential problems failed to adequately protect the Staff Picks curation from the initial broad sweep in October.

As a result, Moyer said, Miller and Hart’s shorts, along with Andy Reid’s “Testing,” Viktoria Traub’s “Shoes and Hooves,” Theo Abadie’s “Chico,” Mansi Maheshwari’s “Bunnyhood,” and Chan Tan Lui’s “Keep Out” were swept up in Vimeo’s rush to implement the safeguards.

Moyer said when the issue was brought to his attention, he quickly watched the shorts and concurred with the curation team’s evaluation. He also realized he had a far bigger problem on his hands than these six films.

For example, “My Neighbor’s Yard” was far less politically charged than dozens of prior Staff Picks. Miller said she made the film as a hopeful example in divided times: “In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from way before this political chasm has deepened, we’ve been going to church together, we’ve been going to soccer practice together, we’ve been each other’s neighbors, and we’ve figured it out thus far. I think it serves as an example [that] we decide how to coexist with each other moving forward as the chasm deepens.”

And yet, Vimeo pulled “My Neighbor’s Yard” from Staff Picks over two brief images of a Trump supporter’s yard in which the president’s Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt was restaged using two Halloween skeletons and a Trump mask (see photo below). Moyer said that when he examined each film, he found similarly benign material that, viewed in context, fell nowhere near the new regulatory line.

“As I look back, I had to go, ‘Hey, how did this happen? And why didn’t I know about this?,’” said Moyer.

Moyer said the rush to implement regulatory safeguards created confusion, especially for Derick Rhodes, VP of Community, who oversees the Staff Picks curation team.

“I made the assumption incorrectly that everyone was on the same page,” Rhodes told IndieWire. “I feel pretty bad about what’s happened because I should have known as soon as those conversations started that something was a little off, or maybe people were moving too fast. I just assumed leadership had signed off on this.”

Moyer said he’s since implemented a clear and efficient appeals process and returned curatorial independence to the Staff Picks team. Going forward, said Rhodes and Moyer, if a film did not violate Vimeo’s TOS the Staff Picks evaluation of the film was enough to overturn any decision.

Rhodes said the review most often flagged animated shorts like “Bug Diner.” Although the films targeted adults, Vimeo’s Trust & Safety and Legal teams raised concerns that regulators could interpret the content as appealing to children and in violation of new child-safety rules. After further review, Rhodes said the “mature” warning label should generally suffice, since Staff Picks targets audiences seeking cutting-edge work, not children’s programming.

With the exception of “My Neighbor’s Yard,” Moyer said they did not encounter political films being flagged. “You can be political and be Staff Picked,” said Moyer. “What we are dealing with here is a mistake on our part that we corrected.”

However, emails reviewing social media logistics between the curation team and filmmakers show that concerns about appearing to platform political content predated the three-week window in October. Five weeks before Vimeo rescinded “My Neighbor’s Yard,” Miller was told not to expect the platform’s usual social media support for her film’s launch because the company’s social team was “skittish about anything political.” In a later exchange, staff suggested Miller remain “neutral-ish” in any content she posted on her own Instagram account if she wanted Vimeo to share it.

Moyer personally reached out to the six filmmakers to apologize and invite their shorts back to Staff Picks; four filmmakers accepted. Miller chose to post her film on Short of the Week (operated by former Staff Picks curator Jason Sondhi) while Hart went forward with her plan to feature “Bug Diner” on revenue-generating YouTube channel Bizaar Studios, an up-and-coming indie animation platform. She’d previously delayed Bizaar to accommodate Vimeo’s demand for an exclusive window.

“Vimeo’s corporate side took my film down for the same exact reason they want to put it back up, risk management,” said Hart in a statement to IndieWire as to why she rejected Moyer’s offer. “I don’t want to signal to new filmmakers and indie audiences that this was a win for me, because it doesn’t feel that way. It’s difficult because I trust the intentions and tastes of the staff pick curation team, but unless it becomes clear that the corporate side of the platform is making major shifts back towards a filmmaker-first ethos, I’m not sure it’s worth it for me.”

Miller rejected the offer to reinstate “My Neighbor’s Yard” for similar reasons. She was concerned that if she didn’t speak up during the short window when the corporate interference was visible, it could be overlooked.

“If I don’t say something, then the censorship lives on in private through rejections and omissions and me accepting the staff pick doesn’t erase that,” Miller told IndieWire. “It just puts a Band-Aid on it.”