With Twitter’s Automated Copyright Strike System Down, Live Sports Events Could Join Movies

As a chaotic management style and skeleton crew of employees are left, Twitter’sTWTR
automated services around rebroadcasts have dropped, leaving the door open for accounts to post entire games.

Remove the politics of reinstating former president Donald Trump, the artist formerly known as Kayne West, or comedian Kathy Griffin, during the roughly 3 weeks that Elon Musk has been at the helm of Twitter has provided a glimpse into how to unravel a large social media platform in short order.

Musk’s managerial moves (firing roughly half of Twitter’s employees), giving ultimatums to the remaining employees (which backfired), and engaging in product releases in the paid blue check mark verification only to have to pull it back can best be described as “why plan when we can just throw things against the wall and see if it will stick.”

Beyond creating a template of what business leaders ought not to do, the firings and exodus of remaining employees have put the infrastructure that Twitter sits on under pressures that are starting to see it crack. While the days of the Twitter whale may not fully arrive, pieces of the Twitter IT architecture are surfacing that places Musk in additional legal peril.

It’s now been widely reported that Twitter’s automated copyright strike/takedown system is no longer functional, leaving the ability for full movies to be uploaded in 2-minute chunks. This has left the bare-bones team managing content to address the issue through manual discovery. While an account that posted the entire Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift was suspended, the method was kludgy and hasn’t prevented other accounts from doing the same.

Into this absolute mess steps, the sports world where the NFL, NBA. And NHL seasons are in full-swing, and the FIFA World Cup is now underway. Broadcast rights for just these sports properties are in the hundreds of billions of dollars and are highly protected by the networks that air or stream them.

Musk’s irresponsible management style has provided a window for Twitter accounts to ostensibly “rebroadcast” live sports within seconds of them airing, breaking copyright. Should someone do so for content that is aired on ESPN or ABC, it would raise the ire of the Disney Co, which owns those networks, not to mention the sports leagues that make it known with every broadcast that rebroadcasting without expressed written consent gets you into hot water with their legal divisions.

Musk appears to be joyously basking in the “bad news is still making news” public relations philosophy through his scattershot approach, but he’s about to face a mountain of lawsuits. The richest man in the world can afford to take those on, but the aura of “Musk is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers” is quickly eroding which affects how the business world views not only Twitter, but Tesla and SpaceX. Musk’s folly with Twitter is him toying with a now private company. He doesn’t have that luxury with the publicly held enterprises he also leads.

Politics aside, Musk appears to now have no clothes and seems determined to undermine his $44 billion investment. It’s not just Hollywood that will be watching the efforts around the copyright strike/takedown policies at Twitter. The sports world is on the edge of their seat.