of the a-social-media-fumble dept
Full disclosure in advance: I am on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which honestly tells you something about how legally a non-event it was. But the underlying story here — that the NFL treats social media like it treats television broadcast rights — is worth diving into, because it reveals something deeply broken about how major sports leagues think about the Internet.
The 2025-2026 NFL season just wrapped up, and with it a federal court ruling in a case called Brown v. NFL that most people completely missed. Two football fans – one in Illinois, one in California –sued the NFL under the Sherman Actalleging that the league violated antitrust law by banning its teams from posting on Bluesky. The fans wanted to follow their teams – the Bears and the now champion Seahawks – on the platform they actually use, instead of Elon Musk’s X. The court dismissed the case for lack of standing, and honestly, that was probably the right legal outcome.
The fans couldn’t prove a concrete injury — the information they wanted was still available for free on And “I don’t like Elon Musk” is not an antitrust injury. The Sherman Act targets conspiracies that restrict trade and harm competition – not content distribution preferences. You can’t force a private organization to distribute its content on the platform you like best, just as we’ve launched efforts to force social media platforms to distribute content they don’t want to distribute.
But the fact that the NFL is legally permitted Being so short-sighted doesn’t mean it’s a smart business decision. You can be completely within your rights and still make a spectacularly bad decision.
Since 2013, the NFL has had a “content partnership” with X (dating back to when it was the useful site known as Twitter). The deal will allow X to publish real-time highlights, and in return the league will presumably get money. As the court noted in its ruling:
Since 2013, the NFL and X (formerly Twitter, Inc.) have had a “content partnership.” This allows X to publish real-time highlights of football games, such as touchdowns. During the offseason, reporters on X post news about team practices and other NFL-related topics, and fans on For example, during the NFL draft (the high-profile annual event where teams select eligible players to join their roster), X published more than a million posts about the NFL; these appeared on users’ screens more than 800 million times. The NFL has repeatedly extended its partnership with X. Fans don’t pay money to get NFL news on X.
Fine. Many organizations have deals with social media platforms. But this just seems like self-sabotage: the NFL apparently used this partnership as justification for telling its own teams so couldn’t even exist on a competitive platform. Several NFL teams, including the New England Patriots, had created accounts on Bluesky, started posting and were building an audience. And then the league office stepped in and told them to shut everything down.
From the statement:
Initially, several NFL teams, including the New England Patriots, had accounts on Bluesky to communicate with fans….
However, as alleged, the NFL later ordered its member teams to delete their Bluesky accounts. But at least some NFL teams would use Bluesky for this instruction. For example, Patriots vice president of content Fred Kirsch has stated: “Every time the league gives us the green light[,] we’ll come back to Bluesky.
Yes, the Patriots’ (Super Bowl-losing) VP of content is publicly saying his team want to to be on Bluesky and just wait for the competition to leave them. This was not a case of disinterested teams. Teams saw the crowd there, set up shop and actively communicated with fans — and the NFL made them stop.
If Front Office Sports reported specifically about the competition at the time told the Patriots to delete their Bluesky account. The league apparently hasn’t even approved Threads – Meta’s X competitor – for real-time team updates either.
So the NFL has essentially decided that when it comes to the kind of real-time updates fans really care about, X is the only approved outlet. Everything else is locked.
This is “broadcast brain” thinking applied to the Internet, and it is spectacularly stupid.
The NFL treats social media platforms like it treats regional sports networks or its Sunday Ticket package: as exclusive territories to be carved up and sold to the highest bidder. In the television world, that model makes sense in a way: there is a limited amount of spectrum, a limited number of cable channels, and that scarcity creates value. But that’s not how social media works. There is no scarcity. Placing an injury report on Bluesky does not do that to delete it from X. Cross-posting is literally free. The whole point of social media for a brand is to be everywhere your audience is.
And the public is increasingly watching Bluesky. If Mashable noted last year Heading into the season, the NFL community on Bluesky had already reached something of a critical mass:
You need the presence and regular posting of big names to legitimize a platform. It certainly helped that people like Kimes and a big part of the N.F.L writers Bluesky made his home on popular sports sites like The Ringer. And last season it felt like Bluesky was hitting terminal speed, with enough people joining that you could totally go to the site for football content. And with the migration of the professionals, of course, the shitposters came with them. Because that’s where the discussion took place. There’s real, easy-to-find, fun NFL talk on Bluesky with minimal interruptions from eg weird ads or angry reaction guys that you might encounter on X.
That’s a real community. A vibrant, engaged community of exactly the kind of hardcore football fans the NFL desperately needs to cultivate. These are, as Mashable noted, the “beam connoisseurs.” They moved to Bluesky because X now kind of sucks when it comes to playing sports. As Mashable also noted:
Bluesky has an edge in some areas: Elon Musk’s site has recently proven unreliable for NFL fans. The site crashed the morning Free Agency launchedone of the biggest days for NFL social media. And the Sports tab – which used to be an easy, fun way to follow games in the Twitter days – degraded to near uselessness years ago. And overall, X has changed to Musk’s focused image more about AI and politics – not things like following football. Sure, you can still follow the NFL on X, but it does mean wading through more clutter than before. Bluesky offers an interesting alternative in that respect.
So the most committed and knowledgeable football community has moved to Bluesky. The teams themselves want to to be on Bluesky. And the NFL’s response to all this is… to ban its teams from appearing.
It’s the digital equivalent of a local blackout (something we’ve been calling for for over a decade) – punishing your most devoted fans because of a deal you made with a middleman in an attempt to create an artificial and unnecessary scarcity.
Meanwhile, the platform supporting the NFL with this exclusivity arrangement is one where fans who signed up for the Super Bowl halftime show could see a significant portion of the X user base full-blown racist meltdown after Bad Bunny’s performance. The NFL chose Bad Bunny specifically to appeal to a broader, global audience – and the audience that actually appreciated the choice? They were at Bluesky where there was an overwhelming outpouring of support for the gig. The league is betting on its real-time presence on the platform where its expansion strategy is shouted out, while teams are blocked from the platform where the new fans actually appear.
This kind of control freaky from the NFL should not surprise anyone who has followed the league’s behavior over the years. This is the same organization that has aggressively lied to bars, restaurants and small businesses for decades about the scope of its “Super Bowl” trademarks, sending threatening letters suggesting you don’t even say the words “Super Bowl” in an unlicensed ad – something that has never actually been true.
The NFL’s institutional DNA is “control equals value,” and they apply that logic to everything from what a church might call its viewing party to the social media apps their teams are allowed to use.
The problem is that control-based thinking only works if you actually do it can control the ecosystem. You can (sort of) control which networks broadcast your games. You can decide which streaming service gets Sunday Ticket. You have no control over where fans talk about football on the internet. The conversation will happen regardless of whether the NFL’s official accounts are there or not. The only question is whether the teams from the competition are allowed to participate.
Any organization whose core business depends on fan engagement should find fans where they are, not drive them to a single platform because you signed an exclusivity deal. Especially when that platform is increasingly known as a hellhole full of AI slop, political anger and engagement, while the platform you block your teams from is the platform where people are actually talking about your product with genuine enthusiasm.
The NFL generates billions in revenue. And yet, when it comes to social media strategy, it’s still stuck in the mentality of 2005. That’s not how any of this works anymore.
Someone at NFL headquarters needs to understand that when your most passionate fans have moved to a new platform and your own teams are begging for permission to follow them there, the smart thing to do is let them go.
Filed Under: blackouts, exclusivity, fans, football, social media
Companies: bluesky, nfl, twitter, x
#NFL #won #lawsuit #Bluesky #ban #social #media #strategy #loser