UnforGIFable

Over the last two weeks, both the Olympics and WWE successfully had Twitter accounts taken down for posting tweets that featured GIFs from the Olympic Games and Summerslam, respectively.

Now, it’s not a secret that copyright law and technology never align, but the fact that Twitter kowtowed to these companies is surprising. Up until recently, Twitter hasn’t really been holding people accountable for any type of hate speech or incredibly vocal racism. Lately, they’ve been reacting swiftly and removing people like Milo Yiannopolos from the platform. Actually, that’s really the only example I can think of. If you take a look at rapper/activist Talib Kweli or writer Ijeoma Oluo’s Twitter accounts, you can see a barrage of heinous @ replies whenever the subject of race, queer rights, religion, or violence comes up. Many of these anonymous people are allowed to continue to tweet incredibly hateful rhetoric, but Twitter BANNED users for repurposing content that came from publicly televised events.

There’s a few things I can decry here, but from a constitutional law perspective, it’s interesting to see Twitter favor the copyright claims of two large corporations over the personal safety of people who are guiding an important discourse about civil rights on the their platform. I’m sure there’s reasoning why Twitter has enacted (or in the case of Kweli and Oluo, among others, not acted) to pursue the claims rights of televised events and not address the replies that activists receive, but it doesn’t mean it’s right.

While Twitter is not the great equalizer as people think that it is, it’s still very much a strong part of how we communicate and perhaps its public shareholders should be wondering why effort is going into shutting down accounts that use GIFs from televised programs and not doing a whole lot about constant hate speech.