GIFs, you could argue, are part of the lifeblood of the internet. If you’re looking for a no-nonsense takedown of someone’s bullshit, you go with the “deal with it” dog. If you want to express pure, truthful joy, you go with dancing Tayne. But for anyone looking to express crushing defeat or overwhelming pain on Twitter by using a GIF of something from the NFL, well, forget about it.
On Monday, Twitter suspended both @Deadspin and @SBNationGIF, two accounts held by sports-related media companies. The former handle is now active again, though it has apparently been instructed—via multiple copyright notices—to quit posting GIFs of both significant NFL plays and snippets of UFC fights. The latter’s still suspended and it might remain down, considering an account that almost solely posts sports GIFs doesn’t really have much to publish when it’s not allowed to publish sports GIFs anymore.
In a statement released on Monday, the NFL said it hadn’t asked Twitter to suspend the accounts, saying rather it asked that the service disable links to “more than a dozen pirated NFL game videos and highlights.” Interestingly, before the 2015 football season started, the NFL and Twitter announced a partnership intended, as the New York Times puts it, “to push game highlights and recaps to the social network as the league sought to expand its reach beyond traditional outlets”—though apparently only on its own terms. The NFL also doesn’t seem to care whether fans or sites like Deadspin post GIFs of highlights or moments from its games on their actual websites, as evidenced by this post from last night—though, whether Philip Rivers punching his glove counts as a “highlight” of Monday night’s game is pretty subjective.
As expected, fans of both Deadspin and @SBNationGIF reacted negatively to the move, which one Twitter user said “doesn’t make more people go to NFL games,” but instead “makes us all hate the NFL more.” Others questioned what Deadspin and @SBNationGIF were doing, saying that the sites crossed a line when they put their own logos on the GIFs, thus changing the essential nature of the NFL-owned broadcast material.