USA: While Elon Musk's management of Twitter has resulted in most employees being fired or resigning, the website is still up and not completely demolished yet, but we can already see cracks in the structure .
Twitter's automated copyright strike/takedown system was found to be broken last night. One user gained notoriety for posting two-minute segments of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift on a 50-tweet thread. Here's where things get even stranger when he went offline this morning:
Media has never been taken in its entirety. Usually, when a takedown occurs, a message appears saying "This media cannot be played". Although the media has been removed, the Tweet and account will remain live. It appears that someone at Twitter had to manually suspend the entire account in this instance.
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And as evidence of a bug, I can still see the suspended account's tweets on my phone. The movie is actually playing out in a tweet that I'm currently viewing on my phone, a side effect of the account suspension. The tweets I favorited the night before writing this article this morning are still available to view, but I can't see it on my desktop.
Again, the system for copyright seems fundamentally flawed. Yes, this specific account was suspended, but only after it gained widespread attention and was likely noticed by an employee. Another user uploaded the 1995 film Hackers in its entirety two minutes at a time, and that is still accessible as of the time of this writing.
Anyone should be able to see the kind of liability it exposes Twitter to if its copyright system breaks down and its newly constrained employees are forced to manually find infringers.
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If Twitter can't get this under control quickly, once media companies become aware of it, they could be hit with all kinds of DMCA claims and potential legal issues. I see them going nuclear once the Disney content is uploaded here.
It should be noted that one of Elon Musk's key concepts for Twitter Blue is to enable users to upload longer videos lasting at least 40 minutes.
If they can't fix their copyright enforcement system, it's going to be a nightmare, but it's not clear that anyone is working on this problem in any significant capacity other than suspending that particular Tokyo Drift account.
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Twitter is currently experiencing a daily drama and shows no signs of slowing down.