A major social media platform with no moderation team is a major social media platform with hilarious DMCA problems.
It’s a long-standing belief here at The Verge that copyright law is the only real law on the internet, because it’s the only speech regulation most people on most platforms will accept. (At least in the United States.)
Post something that blatantly infringes someone else’s copyright, and most platforms will spring into action to take it down, because they are protected from liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if they take action in a reasonable amount of time upon request. And the way the DMCA influences user behavior on platforms is really well-known: we have been writing about “no copyright intended” for over a decade now. There are lots of and lots of people out there who know how it works.
Anyway, Elon Musk isn’t one of them, and he also fired the vast majority of Twitter’s trust and safety and compliance teams while simultaneously increasing the length of videos you can post to Twitter, so now you can just watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie on his slowly-decaying platform. One copy of the movie has been up since April 28th and has amassed… 9.3 million views as of posting.
A lot of those views came from this Tweet, which itself has 8.5 million views.
You can also find Avatar: The Way of Water on Twitter this way. Hey, why do you think the previous administration at Twitter never enabled 60-minute uploads before?
