Yesterday, Twitter suspended the accounts of popular sports sites Deadspin and SB Nation. Several sports leagues, both pro and college, had complained that GIFs and Vines posted to the sites' Twitter feeds infringed on the leagues' copyrights.
"Why were we suspended?" Deadspin columnist Drew Magary asked. "What shadowy forces at BIG TWEET were conspiring against us?
"And why are we stupid enough to put the fate of our traffic in the hands of a third-party social network platform that, for all we know, is run by gargoyles?"
Twitter would not comment directly on the suspensions (and we forgot to ask about the gargoyles). But the company does at least seem to present itself as a reluctant middleman in the contest between free speech and copyright. Twitter did send WIRED a series of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (better known as DMCA) takedown requests that were filed on behalf of the leagues—more than a dozen complaints from the NFL, one request from the Ultimate Fighting League, and several requests from the Big 12 and Southeastern conferences.
Twitter has also posted the takedown notices to the site chillingeffects.org, whose name gives a sense of how Twitter may feel when such requests arrive in its inbox.
Even so, Magary's lament points to very real worries about the power of platforms for more than just Deadspin or SB Nation, however honorable those platforms' intentions. Sure, copyright complaints are par for the Internet course. For years, YouTube has removed video clips that movie, TV, and music production companies say infringe on their intellectual property. But when takedown requests extend from straight-up content replication to social media feeds that act more as a marketing channel for original content, the vulnerability of publishers dependent on these platforms becomes apparent.
After all, if Deadspin, SB Nation, or any other publisher for that matter had published these GIFs on their own sites, they would have to deal with the sports leagues directly. And they'd have the option of fighting back directly too. But publishers can be left in the dark about what's fair game on third-party platforms. And so they may start to censor themselves (hence the "chilling effect").
A day later, @SBNationGIF remains offline. Deadspin's account was reinstated yesterday evening. The site, which has long written posts challenging the NFL and its commissioner Roger Goodell, celebrated with this tweet:
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A spokeswoman for SB Nation says the company is working with Twitter to reinstate the @SBNationGIF account.
