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. [1]. Studies have found that few users actually read the agreements and may not understand what they are agreeing to in exchange for signing [2]. 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. [3] 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.
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. Some platforms are so big that it has become a social norm to be part of that community and so users are pressured to make an account despite whatever issues the terms of service might have.
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. For instance, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.