Funimation, despite having the exclusive license to the series, used a screenshot taken from a pirated anime streaming website to promote Tokyo Ghoul on their Twitter account.
On February 29th, Funimation posted a short Tweet to their official account featuring the words “The one-eyed ghoul” with an image attached of Ken Kaneki and Eto Yoshimura staring each other down during their confrontation:
However, eagle-eyed fans quickly noticed that the bottom screenshot of Kaneki was sourced from, KissAnime, a well-known streaming host of pirated anime, due to the screenshot bearing their distinct watermark:
The Tweet has since been deleted by Funimation, and as of writing a replacement tweet featuring the Tokyo Ghoul:re series or its characters has not been published.
Funimation has been caught in the hypocrisy of engaging with pirated anime while claiming to advocate supporting the industry by purchasing legitimate releases.
In 2011, after threatening users of a popular Torrenting website with a lawsuit for sharing an episode of One Piece, Funimation was caught using subtitles from a pirated source in their dubbing room.
Funimation also condemned using piracy sites like KissAnime back in August 2018.
Unfortunately using piracy sites like kiss and gogo hurt the anime industry as they take legal content and don’t pay the people who make the content. Also watching anime legally shows the creators if a show is popular so more can get made
— Funimation (@FUNimation) August 13, 2018