Twitter Suspends Deadspin, SBNation Accounts

The National Football League asked Twitter to remove the offending material, but it did not ask for the accounts to be suspended.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s clampdown this week on GIFs and game highlights on Twitter could signal a risky strategy ahead by cutting off potential new fans, legal and marketing experts said Tuesday.

The Twitter account of Gawker-owned Deadspin was back online after it was suspended Monday night, while the account of Vox Media’s SB Nation remained inaccessible.

The @Deadspin account was suspended for about an hour yesterday.

The @Deadspin account was reinstated later in the day though links to highlights were stripped, leading to an error message that read: “Tweet withheld: This Tweet from @Deadspin has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder”. During the World Cup, a bot that automatically created and shared clips of every goal received takedown notices on Twitter and other social media sites at the time.

Both publications routinely posts GIFs of important moments in NFL and other sporting events, content that leagues like the NFL, MLB, NBA, and others own.

Aside from the legality of posting short video clips on Twitter, a few have also questioned whether the sports leagues themselves are making the right call in quashing unofficial posts.

“The way we’ve looked at, we’ve been incredibly protective of our live game rights”, Silver said this year at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston.

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Twitter shared with The Washington Post two batches of recent DMCA complaints – 22 in all – related to the suspended accounts. “All other SB Nation accounts are in good standing”, SBNation told The Verge. In August, the league signed a two-year deal to bring more highlights to Twitter.