On Thursday, someone wanted Bama and beat Bama. That someone was Twitter, which suspended the Tide’s football Twitter account for a bit in the afteroon.
Bama’s the latest college football team to have its Twitter account suspended
It apparently happened because of copyright problems.
The account was back online by the mid-afternoon. USA Today was first to figure out that the Tide have dealt with a handful of copyright takedowns this year, which were probably to blame for Bama’s brief suspension.
Right before National Signing Day, a bunch of teams had accounts suspended for apparent copyright reasons.
Texas’ was the Tuesday before Signing Day, and USF’s, Missouri’s, and Georgia’s were on Wednesday morning. If you tried to go to Mizzou’s page to get NSD news on Wednesday morning, here’s what you saw:
This should all be temporary. Here’s what Texas went through, for example:
When Texas’ account went down the day before Signing Day, the school’s sports information director wasn’t sure what happened. But it looked like it had to do with copyright law, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
Inadvertent DMCA violations are pretty commonplace for accounts that post videos that may feature music or footage that has to get licensed. Complicating things is a lot of the times the violations are automatically triggered.
The best way to minimize the cost of sending and responding to so many notices of infringement is to use automated techniques. In particular, online service providers can use automated filtering systems that check content as it is uploaded to stop a user from reposting infringing content
Someone associated with Missouri football pointed out it may have had something to do with copyrighted music being used in videos:
Thankfully, the accounts returned in time, because National Signing Day is a huge day for college football Twitter accounts. With graphics and highlight clips, schools blow out their signee announcements as they roll in throughout the day. Alabama’s didn’t take long to get back online, either. These things usually get resolved more quickly than not.
Weirdness does tend to occur when an account returns from suspension. And for a bit, the Texas account had lost a bunch of followers and its verified badge. They’d be restored later Tuesday afternoon.
The internet’s weird.
