Piracy is Rampant on the Social Media Platform X

A recent visit to Twitter/X had me seeing the service in a much different way, one that I hadn’t expected. I began to notice the proliferation of copyright protected works on the service.

Downloads

The idea for file sharers is to make movies and tv shows easily downloadable from a platform owned by someone else. The players change often, but the process has been around as long as X has.

To be fair, X seems to be taking them down as they would come up; but they get posted faster than they get taken down. The most common thing I’ve seen is to add a poster and some details about the download and then retweet or quote a tweet with a link to a cyber locker. Because of this, you’ll tend to see a bunch of orphaned tweets without any context:

Because of the lack of context, even X can’t tell what’s inside those sites, so they can sometimes linger and hold content for a while. These downloads seem to most often be on a site called transfer.it, a site run by mega.nz, famous for Kim Dotcom and some deep history as a popular cyberlocker for piracy.

Finding most of them is a simple search for “transfer.it” or whatever site is in use for downloading at the time. The more you click on these, the more the X algorithm will bring the posts to you.

Full Movies

You could search for terms like “[full movie](https://x.com/search?q=full movie)” or “pelicula completa.” One could also just search the name of a recent movie and that might elicit some results. Given that X allows users to upload videos of any length (perhaps it’s limited to having a premium account), but posting 90+ minute videos is trivial.

What’s Next?

I recall how this was a problem on YouTube for a time, until they improved their video checking structure to combat it. From time to time, I do still see full movies posted there, but the video is either flipped or otherwise modified to game that system.

Finding these posts on X wasn’t exactly trivial given that they’re still trying to evade X’s own whack-a-mole system, but also not that difficult. It’s not clear how much X does to block given full-length movies are posted there for everyone to see.

And the most interesting movie share has to go to the account that tried to share the movie “Citizen Vigilante.” That it was taken down is no surprise, but that Elon Musk, owner of X, shared out the same full movie from his account to garner attention and that was fine (or paid for).

In my mind, this could be the future of how copyrighted materials are shared online. It would seem the easiest thing to simply spray a new release across all these online platforms so anyone who wants it can just watch. The question being, if the video gets taken down while you’re in the middle of the movie, does the stream die? Have you seen this on any other platform?