Twitter's automated copyright strike system appears to be broken, as users upload full movies; some accounts with viral tweets were later suspended
While Twitter, the website, remains online and has not simply collapsed after the vast majority of workers were fired or resigned under Elon Musk …
ForbesPaul Tassi
Context & Ripple Effects
The apparent failure came after Twitter had frozen some staff access to moderation and policy-enforcement tools, making a lapse in automated enforcement more consequential than an isolated bad upload. The later suspension of some viral accounts shows that enforcement was still occurring, but not necessarily through the system meant to catch uploads at scale.
Subsequent reporting tied the post-layoff environment to code freezes and concurrent system changes, while users later reported broad service disruptions. Together, the coverage frames copyright detection as part of a wider operational-reliability problem at Twitter.
First-order effects
Users can leave full copyrighted movies on Twitter while the automated strike system is failing, expanding the material available through the platform immediately.
Twitter is left relying at least partly on account suspensions after posts gain traction, affecting users whose uploads become viral.
Second-order effects
Account-level suspensions make enforcement appear less predictable to uploaders than automated detection, since viral distribution can occur before action is taken.
Twitter's engineering and moderation teams must address a copyright-control failure alongside the system changes and freezes reported after the layoffs.
Third-order effects
If enforcement tooling continues to degrade during major code changes, Twitter's role as a platform gatekeeper depends less on consistent automated controls and more on reactive interventions.
The pattern points to operational capacity becoming a constraint on policy enforcement: staffing and change-management decisions can determine whether platform rules function in practice.
The trend: Twitter's post-layoff instability illustrates how rapid organizational change can weaken the automated systems that make large-scale platform governance enforceable.
An entire movie fits in 49 tweets. Twitter's copyright strike system appears to be broken so someone has uploaded the whole of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift 😂 https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Automatic copyright flagging is a labor-saving system designed to spare Twitter staff (and copyright holders) from having to respond individually to DMCA takedown requests, a laborious process. If the automatic system is not working, Twitter staff will be unable to keep up.
While I expect lots of leeway, there is a real scenario in which Apple/Google remove Twitter because of content moderation issues or because Twitter decides to bypass the 15%-30% cuts. Notably, we appear to now know how Apple's App Store chief feels about the new Twitter. https:/…
Phil is one of just a few Apple executives who are/were on Twitter (Tim, Eddy, and Lisa Jackson remain). Have a feeling this was a decision Phil took himself without checking with Apple's PR/comms team first. They're as surprised as we all are, I reckon. Waiting for a comment. ht…