It has been quite clear for some time ever since Elon Musk injected a quarter billion dollars into the election that there is something of a co-presidency happening here. While the Trumpists are still pursuing the conservative movement’s dream of rolling back the progress of the entire Civil Rights and New Deal eras, the tech barons joined them and completed their long-plotted takeover of society to try to turn us all into gig workers, in large part aided by the alliance between immensely powerful figures in each movement like Peter Thiel and James Dobson in 2016.
Elon Musk famously almost killed Peter Thiel, and while he was on vacation, was dethroned as CEO of PayPal by Theil and the rest of the so-called “Paypal Mafia” (which included Trump’s crypto advisor and Elon crony David Sacks), before later making up with the people who stabbed him in the back. I bring all this up to point out that the testy alliance between Elon, the tech right, and Trumpism has long been established and no one should have been surprised by Elon’s much more direct involvement in the Trump campaign in 2024. This is a long-budding crisis that has now crested into corporate America’s boardrooms as many of their customers are voting with their digital feet against this fascist takeover.
So what does any of this have to do with the NFL?
Twitter.
The owner of Twitter just did a Nazi salute behind the presidential seal, something that would have landed him in front of a very pissed off judge 80 years ago, which calls into question why people would still use Twitter, especially now that multiple alternatives exist. As Kat Tenbarge reported, “NBC News has identified more than 50 subreddit communities where moderators have since announced that links from X, formerly Twitter, will no longer be allowed in new posts and comments. The communities protesting range in size from dozens of members to millions, totaling at least 40 million members.”
One of the largest communities to ban links to the Nazi site is r/NBA, with 15 million members, and they have banned links to the Mark Zuckerberg universe of websites too. Reddit’s NFL community is also banning links to Elon’s propaganda platform filled with hate. Millions of sports fans are clearly looking for competitors to the products owned by tech oligarchs who just got a front row seat at Trump’s inauguration.
Yet the New England Patriots said yesterday that they were ordered by the NFL to take down their account on Bluesky, Twitter’s direct competitor that has seen a massive wave of sign-ups since the election, and experienced another boost this week after Elon did the Nazi salute that Nazis think is a Nazi salute.
ProFootballTalk wrote that “It’s unclear why the NFL hasn’t approved BlueSky. It might have something to do with the league’s content deal with Twitter.” If the league does have a deal with Twitter that does not allow them to post content on other social media platforms, as PFT noted, then that raises serious antitrust concerns for a league that is provided an antitrust exemption by the federal government. These would be pretty blatant anticompetitive practices by a company owned by a man who bought himself the presidency before bringing America’s most popular sports league to heel. This is existential stuff here.
The NFL is America’s cultural center. The Super Bowl is the closest thing this country has to a national holiday. What they do in their bid to replace the American flag with their shield is try to appeal to everyone at all times, while also ensuring that the 32 maniacs who control the league get as much money as humanly possible. If the NF-freaking-L is banning their teams from posting on a competitor’s website, costing them a chance to make more money, due to some bizarre notion of competition that has never been applied to the internet like this until Elon came along, then Olympus truly has fallen.
But there’s a chance it’s not that sinister.
A.J. Perez wrote a great article for Front Office Sports in November about how there are real reasons why sports teams have not joined the mass migration to Bluesky yet. First off, these teams have spent years investing their time, money and energy into growing a big audience on Twitter, and Bluesky just doesn’t have that kind of infrastructure that only comes with the passage of time. I understand this too, as we inherited the 482,000 follower Splinter Twitter account, and while Elon throttles our links enough to the point where Bluesky is a better source of traffic for us with a 5,200 follower account, Twitter still moves the needle enough for us that we cannot afford to stop auto-posting our articles there, even though we’ve all largely abandoned the platform otherwise.
Perez in FOS noted that the “NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, WNBA, NWSL, and MLB all have Threads accounts, although their collective following on that platform (17.9 million total) is dwarfed by their reach on X (106.1 million as of Nov. 25).” Even Mark Zuckerburg, the beta version of Elon Musk, can’t provide these teams what they’ve built on Twitter. The biggest problem the Nazi site presents is the network effect it built before it became the Nazi site. I am entirely on Bluesky now, but I do go back to Twitter to follow sports because while a lot of my favorite sports posters are on Bluesky, the teams and many league reporters and surrogates are not, and the video highlight experience is not remotely the same. If these leagues left Twitter, they would be abandoning massive audiences.
But that doesn’t mean that they can’t double down on building an audience on a similar platform with a lot of people like me who initially joined Twitter to see more sports content and talk about the games as they happen. Bluesky’s video is still in its nascent stages, but they are improving it, as they just released a TikTok clone. The NFL launched a portal a few months ago on Twitter, which is a customized feed specifically for their content, and customized feeds are one of Bluesky’s main features. Bluesky even created one specifically for the Super Bowl last year. An NFL spokesperson told FOS in November that the league is “aware of Bluesky but currently does not have an official presence on the platform.”
This is entirely an NFL issue, according to Kraft Sports + Entertainment Group VP/Content Fred Kirsch, who said during a recent episode of the Patriots Unfiltered podcast that “whenever the league gives us the green light, we’ll get back on BlueSky.” The question now is what is the hold-up? Why won’t the league let its teams post its content on a platform that has 29 million users as of this writing? That’s free money that they’re just leaving on the ground.
The only reason is the obvious. Some sort of anticompetitive agreement with the world’s richest man who staged something of a coup and then just did a Nazi salute behind the Seal of the president of the United States. The NFL also has lucrative broadcast deals with companies like ABC who just bent the knee to Trump and punted an open and shut winnable case. There are a lot of companies and people revealing their true yellow and fascist colors right now in preemptively surrendering to Trump and Elon, and the NFL seems to be ruminating on whether they should join them. This extremely self-serious league has always functioned in a style similar to North Korea if it was controlled by 32 Kim Jong Uns, so it’s not surprising that they wouldn’t want anyone getting out in front of the dear leaders’ stated policy, but after this direct intervention, the league is very clearly waiting to hear from its demigods who donate to Republicans nine times more than to Democrats on how to proceed next.
The outright banning of links to Elon’s Nazi site and even screenshots in r/NBA’s case is a big deal given Reddit’s importance to the internet’s zeitgeist. This is an indication of where the winds are blowing for a big chunk of the NFL’s viewership, and how America’s most popular sports league deals with a growing number of its customers boycotting its Nazi partner will tell us a lot about how many more of America’s corporate institutions are ready to dive headfirst into the dumbest, most childish brand of fascism the earth has ever known.