Your rights on Twitter and Facebook

Hav­ing looked at the evo­lu­tion of iden­tity own­er­ship since the early days of the com­mer­cial inter­net in the pre­vi­ous entry, I now drill in on the terms offered by two of the most pop­u­lar social ser­vices: Twit­ter and Face­book. What I found sur­prised me, as Twit­ter appears more aggres­sive when it comes to user rights man­age­ment than Face­book is.

Twit­ter and your content

Twit­ter, one of the most pop­u­lar social ser­vices today, has one of the most enlight­ened Terms of ser­vices: They try hard to give you as many rights as pos­si­ble and to take as few things as pos­si­ble for them­selves… and yet, you find things like this (empha­sis is mine):

By sub­mit­ting, post­ing or dis­play­ing Con­tent on or through the Ser­vices, you grant us a world­wide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sub­li­cense) to use, copy, repro­duce, process, adapt, mod­ify, pub­lish, trans­mit, dis­play and dis­trib­ute such Con­tent in any and all media or dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods (now known or later devel­oped).

So, if Twit­ter decides, in the future that all pri­vate tweets are now pub­lic, they can legally do so. Or if they want to com­pile a book of your tweets and sell it with­out giv­ing you a dime, you’ve granted them those rights too. And then (empha­sis mine again)…

You agree that this license includes the right for Twit­ter to make such Con­tent avail­able to other com­pa­nies, orga­ni­za­tions or indi­vid­u­als who part­ner with Twit­ter for the syn­di­ca­tion, broad­cast, dis­tri­b­u­tion or pub­li­ca­tion of such Con­tent on other media and ser­vices, sub­ject to our terms and con­di­tions for such Con­tent use.

So if you said you liked a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct on Twit­ter, the com­pany can then part­ner with the maker of that prod­uct to use your endorse­ment in their ads, once again with­out giv­ing you any­thing for is. In fact, the mat­ter of com­pen­sa­tion is clearly stated in that TOS:

You agree that this license includes the right for Twit­ter to make such Con­tent avail­able to other com­pa­nies, orga­ni­za­tions or indi­vid­u­als who part­ner with Twit­ter for the syn­di­ca­tion, broad­cast, dis­tri­b­u­tion or pub­li­ca­tion of such Con­tent on other media and ser­vices, sub­ject to our terms and con­di­tions for such Con­tent use.

… and of course, Twit­ter is mak­ing sure that any­thing they’ve given you can be taken back:

We reserve the right at all times (but will not have an oblig­a­tion) to remove or refuse to dis­trib­ute any Con­tent on the Ser­vices and to ter­mi­nate users or reclaim usernames

… and all this from one of the friend­lier ser­vices out there (for the record, I picked Twit­ter because it’s often been painted as a friendly ser­vice com­pared to Facebook.

Did Face­book become the good guy?

So this brings up to the big dif­fer­ence between Twit­ter and Face­book. Many have decried Facebook’s push to shat­ter pri­vacy set­tings for users of the ser­vice. So let’s take a look at their TOS.

Face­book ini­tially seems to point to a pol­icy that seems to give you more con­trol of your con­tent until you re-read the state­ment (empha­sis mine):

For con­tent that is cov­ered by intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights, like pho­tos and videos (“IP con­tent”), you specif­i­cally give us the fol­low­ing per­mis­sion, sub­ject to your pri­vacy and appli­ca­tion set­tings: you grant us a non-exclusive, trans­fer­able, sub-licensable, royalty-free, world­wide license to use any IP con­tent that you post on or in con­nec­tion with Face­book (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP con­tent or your account unless your con­tent has been shared with oth­ers, and they have not deleted it.

First of all, I want to say thank you to Face­book for lim­it­ing their rights to the cur­rent times and not get­ting rights for method of dis­tri­b­u­tion that could be cre­ated in the future. How­ever, this por­tion about “unless your con­tent has been shared with oth­ers” destroys the rest of the argu­ment: one posts con­tent to Face­book to share it with oth­ers so what you seem to be say­ing here is that if it’s been on Face­book, we can use it.

The rest of the con­tract actu­ally seems to offer friend­lier terms than Twit­ter does and of course, high­lights that they can turn your access to ser­vice off at any time (once again, empha­sis is mine):

If you vio­late the let­ter or spirit of this State­ment, or oth­er­wise cre­ate risk or pos­si­ble legal expo­sure for us, we can stop pro­vid­ing all or part of Face­book to you

Any lawyer will tell you that pos­si­ble legal expo­sure can be cre­ated in a lot of cases, so this seems to give an almost blank check to Face­book to turn off your access.

Com­pare and Contrast

What was most inter­est­ing to me, in read­ing the terms of both Face­book and Twit­ter is that it seems we, as users, are giv­ing up more rights when we are using Twit­ter than when we are using Face­book. Whether this is a func­tion of Face­book hav­ing been at the cen­ter of a few firestorms regard­ing user rights and there­fore forced to change its terms to make them friend­lier to users or some other fac­tor regard­ing cor­po­rate cul­ture is not some­thing I can assess. All I can tell is that it seems that one gives up more by pub­lish­ing con­tent on Twit­ter than they do by doing so on Facebook.

Does that mean that Face­book should get a free pass? Absolutely not. The pres­sures con­sumers have exer­cised on the ser­vice have prob­a­bly had some impact. What it does mean, how­ever, is that Twit­ter may have been get­ting by with an eas­ier treat­ment than Face­book and I sus­pect that, as its user-base grows and its impact increases, the ser­vice may find itself forced to revise some of the terms of its services.

I am no lawyer but I sus­pect there is word­ing that could be friend­lier to users of the ser­vice and I would encour­age the com­pany to look at that word­ing before it becomes a firestorm.