Terms of Service on Social Media Platforms

A Terms of Service agreement is an agreement between a user and a website about what terms the user must agree to in order to use the website. All social media sites require users to sign a Terms of Service agreement to create an account. . Studies have found that few users actually read the agreements and may not understand what they are agreeing to in exchange for signing . This has caused some jurisdictions to create regulations restricting what can appear in terms of service agreements and how much control users have regarding their privacy. For example, laws such as the Digital Millenium Copyright ACT (DMCA) regulate that data cannot be collected from minors under the age of 13 and that terms of service agreements must be written in language that is easy to understand. Despite this, many of these agreements allow control over the users' accounts and authorize use of users' personal data for profit, creating controversy. With how large social media platforms are, it is hard for people to give up all of the discussion and engagement that comes from using the platform.

graph showing the word count of the terms of service for many social media platforms

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Readability

Most users, when signing up for an account on a social media platform do not read terms of service because they are too long. For example, Tik Tok has 7,459 words in its terms of service, Tinder has 6,215 words in its terms of service, Twitter has 5,633 words in its terms of service, and so on. With an average reading speed of 200 words per minute, Tik Tok's terms of service would take about 37 minutes to read. A survey done by Deloitte of 2000 people showed that 91% of people don't read the term of service before accepting them. For people of ages 18-34, this number goes up to 97%. Another, more specific study was conducted where a fake social media platform called "Name Drop" was created and in the terms of service agreement, they required users to "give up their first-born child as payment" and it turned out 98% of participants in this study accepted this agreement. In another experiment, people connecting to a Wi-Fi hotspot agreed to "1000 hours of customer service" without even realizing it. Although these mock clauses cannot be held up in court, and terms of service clauses are not legally binding, but this raises an issue of what companies put into the terms of service that consumers aren't reading and are agreeing too.

Fairness

Although companies have complete control over their platform, they can still act in an unfair manner, like favoring bigger corporation accounts over smaller individuals or banning users without giving them a reason for why they were banned. When this happens, the smaller accounts have to go through a long process of sending in a ticket, waiting for it to get read, responding, etc. While all of this is happening, they have no access to the social media making it hard for people to know what happened to them and they could potentially suffer a monetary loss if their account was part of their branding. Occasionally, the news can rise in popularity which leads to bigger content creators voicing their opinions which pressures the platform to immediately fix the issue. The overall issue is that the smaller accounts get silenced just because of the fact that they are not as popular and they bring in less users. Most platforms are privately owned, so in their terms of service, they reserve the right to delete someone's account arbitrarily. For example, in Airbnb's terms of service, they say,

"Airbnb may also terminate this agreement immediately and without notice and stop providing access to the Airbnb Platform if you breach these Terms, you violate our Additional Legal Terms, or Policies, you violate applicable laws, or we reasonably believe termination is necessary to protect Airbnb..."

This can be useful when they have reasonable doubt that someone using an Airbnb is abusing their service, but there is no hard evidence, so to be safe they can ban the user, but this can also lead to abuse and unfair banning. In February of 2023, Lauren Southern, a political commentator who had previously been banned from Airbnb, found that her parents were banned from Airbnb for being "closely related" to her. She stated, "They have never booked anything for me. They do not represent me in any way. They aren't publicly political in any way." She spoke out on Fox News and Airbnb was trending on twitter, which led to Airbnb claiming that it was a mistake and unbanning their accounts. Airbnb could have banned her parents because they thought the parents might book rooms for her, but they didn't state this when they reversed the ban. This raises the question, should companies be able to ban anyone, even if they have not used their product before, to protect themselves?

Censorship

In August of 2020, after Kyle Rittenhouse's arrest, Facebook removed Kyle's Facebook and Instagram account, removed posts praising him, and started blocking searches for "Kyle Rittenhouse". Facebook claimed that this was done to limit misinformation. However, removing someone's access to their own social media accounts can be seen as censorship. Also, blocking searches and removing only the posts praising him can also be seen as censorship.

In November 2021, after Facebook changed its company name to Meta, an Instagram user with the handle @metaverse got their account suspended for impersonation. Thea-Mai Baumann was an artist, and she had the handle since 2012. She had less than 1000 followers when the account got suspended. She tried for a month to have her account restored unsuccessfully before she turned to New York Times who covered this incident. After the news spread, Instagram restored her account claiming it was wrongly removed.

In November of 2022, after many users changed their twitter name to Elon Musk, whether it was for impersonation or joking, Elon Musk stated, "Any twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying 'parody' will be permanently suspended." Many accounts were suspended, including Chipzel, a musician who had the name "Elon Musk 'parody'", which clearly specified his name was a joke and not an impersonation. Although Elon Musk's policy was intended to take down impersonation, which is harmful, it was abused to take down someone who had jokingly changed their handle. Moreover, even if the twitter name is changed, one's twitter handle is unique, and cannot be changed to impersonate someone. This brings into question whether Chipzel's banning was because Elon Musk felt personally attacked, or whether it was a mistake. In both situations, a policy was abused which led to the banning of a user without a clear reason why.

In February of 2023, Twitch streamer F1NN5TER, was banned for "prolonged touching of female breasts" despite being a cisgender man. He is a male streamer who was dressing up as a female for his "Girl Month" campaign. In this case, Twitch effectively "decided" the streamer's gender, and although F1NN5TER is not trans, this raises concerns for the trans community and how safe they are on this platform. This incident also brings into question if Twitch, and other companies, might be inserting their social values into the rules that they make.

DMCA

YouTube follows a system where if a youtuber receives a certain number of copyright strikes, they will get banned. And as many big youtubers make a living off of YouTube, they risk losing their main income. In February of 2019, Kenzo and ObbyRaidz, received separate claims on each of their videos along with messages on their private social media telling them to pay in Bitcoin for these copyright strikes to be dropped. These videos were taken down until they reached out to YouTube on twitter, where YouTube responded removing the copyright strikes and reinstating their videos. This is concerning for content creators who make a living off of YouTube because YouTube believes the copyright claimers first, taking down the video before the content creator can even contest it. This deletion of the video affects its performance and therefore the creator's income. PewDiePie, the former most subscribed channel on YouTube, states, "YouTube always seems to side with big companies when it comes to copyright claims, even if the video falls under the terms of Fair Use." Even he faced issues with YouTube's copyright handling when he faced copyright strikes on songs that he created. For example, his song "Bi*** Lasagna", now with 312 million views, was copyright striked by a company called Repost Network. This company also copyright striked another song of his, "Mine All Day", and when he tried to dispute the claim, it was rejected. When a huge content creator like PewDiePie faces an issue like this, he can turn to his large audience to pressure YouTube to reinstate the video, but this raises an issue for smaller content creators who might have to wait for YouTube to manually look into it, or even lawyer up themselves to prove their video is fair use. From YouTube's perspective, they need to have strict copyright enforcement so that they don't get sued by companies finding their content being copied on YouTube's platform, but this leaves YouTube's content creators vulnerable.

Twitch is a streaming website where users can stream their games for an audience to watch. In their terms of service, they link their "DMCA Guidelines" which is their policy on how they deal with copyrighted content. Streamers are not allowed to play copyrighted content on their streams, and if they do, they get a copyright warning and a strike on their stream. If they get too many copyright strikes, they get banned from the platform. One issue however is that anyone can issue copyright strikes. Also, twitch follows a "strike first, ask questions later" policy where whenever they receive a takedown notice, they will remove the content or takedown the stream and then the streamer has to send a counterclaim, claiming that the material they showed on stream was fair use. This causes streamers to have to deal with trolls that create false claims trying to take down a streamer's content. In June of 2020, Twitch issued many copyright notices saying, "We recognize that by deleting this content, we are not giving you the option to file a counter-notification or seek a retraction from the rights hold." After this, the company stated that it would resume normal processing at the end of the week. This led to the streamers being upset over the lack of clarity and unfairness of the situation. They were not sure why they had no opportunity to counter the claims, they had no idea what content was being claimed, and they had no idea if these strikes meant they were closer to being banned.

Also, in November of 2020, twitch streamers Devin Nash and Syndicate both received copyright strikes on videos that they had already deleted. Devin says on twitter, "Streamers are STILL being DMCA'd for clips/VODs they have deleted. Why? They're still on Twitch's server even if you delete them." This is unfair to the content creators because they have already done as much as they possibly can to remove their clips and videos from the platform, but they are still receiving strikes, but it also raises a question of privacy around whether or not Twitch should be allowed to store clips and videos that the creator themselves has deleted on their private servers.

Privacy Issues

Social media platforms make a lot of money through advertising which becomes more profitable the more targeted it is. Because users of the platform make their personal information just by using social media, the companies can use this to personalize ads. However, this leads to issues where the companies collect data it is not supposed to be able to access or holds on to data the user deleted which are both things that the user did not agree to when signing up for their account.

Facebook

In February 2009, Facebook made a change to its terms of service allowing themselves to use your content even after it was removed. This caused a lot of backlash, with 38,000 users joining a Facebook group protesting the change. This led to the Electronic Privacy Information Center filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. In order to control the damage, the CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that it was a needed change to allow users to keep direct messages with someone who deleted their account.

Instagram

In December of 2012, Instagram changed its terms of service to say someone using their platform agreed that their content could be used by Instagram to advertise without any compensation to the creator. This hurts creators because advertisers can avoid asking the original creators and can go through Instagram to use their content which ends up with the creator not being paid. It also makes the average user uncomfortable because even though they might not want their photos to be used publicly in advertisements, Instagram could sell them to be used as such. Changing the terms of service after so many people already use the platform makes a hard decision for the user, they could lose all of their friends and followers made through the platform, or they could stay on the platform and risk their information being abused. In this situation, a lot of content creators came together and closed their accounts, hurting themselves, but making a statement to Instagram that they don't want their content to be used in this manner.

Tik Tok

More recently, in August 2022, Joe Rogan, a podcast host, brought to attention Tik Tok's Terms of Service, in which they reserve the right to access information such as, "IP address, user region, mobile carrier, device model, network type, screen resolution, operating system, apps and files, keystroke patterns, audio settings and connected audio devices, and login information." This raised the question of whether Tik Tok's parent company ByteDance was selling this information. Tik Tok, however, in its terms of service states that it does not sell the users' data however they "may transmit your data to its servers or data centers outside of the United States for storage and/or processing." The CIA has stated that the Chinese government could potentially intercept the data, but there is no evidence of them having done so.