Twitter removed a picture from a Trump tweet after receiving a DMCA complaint from the NYT, which owns the rights to the photo taken in 2015
Twitter has removed a picture from a tweet by President Trump on Tuesday after it received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is not Twitter's first enforcement action against Trump's account on copyright grounds: weeks earlier it pulled a campaign video tribute to George Floyd over a copyright complaint from an image owner, and the arc since has escalated through rule labels to the January removals that ended with @POTUS tweets taken down after his ban.
What distinguishes today's case is who pulled the trigger — not Twitter's trust-and-safety team but The New York Times, exercising its ownership of a 2015 photo through the DMCA takedown process. That makes this a data point in how rights-holders, not just platforms, can constrain what appears on the president's primary channel.
First-order effects
- Trump's tweet now runs without the NYT-owned image, and the NYT has demonstrated it can unilaterally strip media from his account without any platform policy judgment being made at all.
Second-order effects
- Other news organizations holding photos of Trump have a working template: a single DMCA filing achieves what years of complaints about unlicensed use of press photography had not, raising the price of embedding news imagery in political messaging.
Third-order effects
- If rights-holders keep using DMCA notices as a de facto moderation tool, enforcement on major platforms splits into two tracks — platform rules applied by the company, and copyright claims applied by owners — with publishers gaining structural leverage over political accounts regardless of who runs the platform.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is becoming an independent channel of content control on social platforms, letting rights-holders like the NYT do directly what platforms are pressured to do indirectly.