CrossFit’s Facebook, Instagram Exodus Spurs Copycat Accounts
As news broke of CrossFit’s indefinite exodus from Facebook and Instagram, several official-looking accounts began popping up.
Instagram and Facebook accounts with official sounding titles like “CrossFit Headquarters,” “CrossFit Health” and “2019 Reebok CrossFit Games” emerged as early as Tuesday night.
The pages we’ve seen so far:
- @CrossFit_Affiliates Instagram
- @CrossFitHeadquarters Instagram
- @CrossFitTweets Instgram
- 2019 CrossFit Games Facebook
- 13th CrossFit Games Facebook event
Confirmed fake: CrossFit confirmed that none of these accounts are owned or operated by CrossFit.
When there’s chaos, it’s a good time to profit. Here are a few of the ways these pages are trying to pass themselves off as “official.”
- CrossFit Tweets’ bio: “Want to keep up with Crossfit, Crossfit Health and Crossfit Games but don’t want to deal with Twitter? Look no further.”
- CrossFit Affiliate’s bio: “www.crossfit.com/affiliate-list”
- Posting images of CrossFit.com workouts, the old CrossFit Journal logo and quotes from Greg Glassman.
- CrossFit Affiliate’s post: “The new era of CrossFit® will begin next week. Are you ready for the change?”
Is that even legal? The US Patent and Trademark Office defines trademark infringement as “Trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of a trademark or service mark on or in connection with goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services.”
- We are not lawyers, but in each of these circumstances it appears that the page is attempting to pass themselves off as an official CrossFit page.
The bottom line: Even if pages like these are technically legal, their existence only serves to cause more confusion and the spread of misinformation. Our general approach is “don’t feed the trolls” so we’re not following and not giving them anymore attention.
If you see more of these, please email to [email protected].
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