BY CURTIS WOODWARD

@woodward_curtis

Billionaire egomaniacs with unstoppable social media machines at their feet are killing rugby league as we know it and they wouldn’t have a clue.

Why would they?

Much has been made of Thursday’s Facebook massacre – ordered by the king of all nerds – Mark Zuckerberg.

We can sit here for days talking about the politics involved.

But we won’t.

The most important thing is how your favourite websites and their social media platforms are going to be wiped out… mostly anyway.

Scarier than any plug Facebook pulled on Thursday is how it hurts independent rugby league outlets and what that means for you.

We can all live without the big end of town and their ‘clickbait’.

The worry is – what about the rest of us?

Men and women that have the best interests of the game firmly tucked inside their hearts?

Some of you may not realise the difference between Facebook and Twitter for footy websites or how it works.

Yeah, it’s cool to have Twitter but it has nothing on the ‘engagements’ or ‘reach’ that Facebook can offer.

Social media statistics don’t lie.

Facebook drives most traffic to a website.

Independent rugby league websites have worked years on their social media platforms and building trust with their followers.

Before @the81stminute on Twitter was @the81stminute it was @footysocial. It was handed over to your writer with roughly 1000 followers many, many years ago.

You could call it a grind to get where we were.

Around 6000 followers before a mega-machine came rolling through for blood – to that in a moment.

We too also took in an old Facebook page and grew that exponentially. From nothing, and it may not mean much to some, we grew our Facebook page from basically zero to almost 7000 likes.

Veteran journalist Steve Mascord, who has been ahead of the curve in league media independence and the future, says the small fish will fry.

“On one hand the big media operators wanted paying from Facebook for their content to be featured,” Mascord told the81stminute.com.

“And Facebook is within its rights to say ‘no thanks, we don’t want your content’.

Maroons cult hero predicts Cameron Smith will start 2021 season in Queensland Cup

“On the other (hand), the small news websites had absolutely no say in the matter and the way they have been treated is demonstrably wrong and unfair.”

But back to our Twitter saga.

In the last week, the81stminute.com received something called a ‘DMCA’ copyright violation from Twitter.

From what we have learned, our mistake was using a Foo Fighters song as backing to a 20-second State of Origin hype video in October or November last year.

Totally our fault.

Bush league.

Completely admitted.

Making it worse, we posted it two more times in quick succession – using different lyrics from the song as part of our posts.

Being artistic and all that.

If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have done it.

Big mistake.

We’ve sent a million apologies.

But we now understand, according to Twitter, that @the81stminute is basically dead in the water. A copyright company in England has our 6000 followers – built slowly over a decade – in their hands.

They don’t even have to reply.

That’s it.

Twitter has already admitted in official documents that they won’t do anything about it.

It’s up to some guy in London to write back to Twitter to say @the81stminute aren’t bad guys or made an error.

Skynet is about.

Beware.

The machines are coming.

@woodward_curtis