BARSTOOL SPOTTING:: Daily Beast Exclusve

How Barstool Built an Empire by Swiping Sports Highlights

RED-HANDED

Robert Silverman

How Barstool Built an Empire by Swiping Sports Highlights

RED-HANDED

A Daily Beast investigation found more than 40 content-swiping Twitter accounts apparently controlled by Barstool—a key to the growth of its massive media empire.

Robert Silverman

Updated Sep. 11, 2023 3:17AM EDT / Published Sep. 11, 2023 12:35AM EDT 

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty

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Four years ago, Barstool Sports were raked over the coals for taking a comedian’s video. The sprawling and bro-tastic media company already had a reputation for stealing jokes, but that act of theft inadvertently revealed another way they were profiting from content they didn’t own: an anonymous, seemingly random Twitter account which was in fact run by Barstool.
The innocuous account, one of many Barstool used to harass the comedian, did nothing but rip and post copyrighted sports highlights and other viral clips, which were then embedded and shared by official Barstool accounts on Twitter, which has since been rebranded as X.
It provided a crude but effective way for Barstool to prevent their legit accounts from accumulating Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) strikes. The law requires websites to remove allegedly stolen digital material while the matter is under dispute. On Twitter, an account found in violation of the law will receive a “strike.” With enough strikes, Twitter will suspend or ban an account.
In this case, only the innocuous video-laundering account would have been penalized if caught, not Barstool. And that’s what happened: Twitter suspended the account at some point after The Daily Beast reported it was set up using a barstoolsports.com email address.

At first blush, the existence of this account read like an odd blip, a remnant of an older, rowdier, and less corporate version of Barstool. But in reality, it was the tip of the iceberg.
A new investigation by The Daily Beast found over 40 more anonymous Twitter accounts that give every indication of being controlled by Barstool. This network has laundered incalculable amounts of copyright-protected sports and entertainment videos and reaped billions of views over at least the last four years. For example: One anonymous account’s ripped video of The Weeknd’s Super Bowl LV performance racked up 36 million views for Barstool in less than 24 hours.
Taken as a whole, Barstool has built out an apparent system of organized copyright infringement. . .

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