Last night, a famous domestic abuser beat a famous racist in a big boxing match, and as exciting as that would be on any other occasion, the fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor seemed like an even bigger deal than most fights between abusers and racists. As it turns out, that could be because a lot of people who wouldn’t or couldn’t spend the money to actually watch the fight on Pay-Per-View ended up seeing it anyway thanks to the magic of social media. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Showtime actually took steps to ban sites with a history of illegally streaming sporting events from getting access to the fight, but that didn’t stop streaming service Periscope from floating to the top of the trending topics section on Twitter.
As it turns out, users were able to simply find individual Periscope users—rather than known sites—who were streaming the fight from their app and watch it that way, circumventing any and all paywalls. In a way, it’s just like going over to somebody else’s house to watch the boxing match, but you can just send them a heart emoji instead of having to talk to them at all.