Many people don’t pay attention to Terms of Service, often skipping past them to access their favorite sites and apps. With the latest X update, however, there are some glaring issues being brought to users’ attention. Twitter, now rebranded as X, has been under fire long before Elon Musk bought it from Jack Dorsey, former CEO and co-founder of Twitter. When an update in X’s ToS was released October 16, it was something every user was taking issue with.
One of the biggest changes is the tweak in the block feature. On October 16, 2024, the account for X’s official engineering team stated, “we’ll be launching a change to how the block function works. If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.),” (XEng, 2024) at 10:32 a.m. Users were quick to criticize this change, claiming that it diminishes the purpose of the block button entirely. Many of these critiques are rooted in the need for internet safety, whether it be concerns of cybersecurity, cyberstalking, and/or cyberbullying.
Additionally, there was something hidden in the Content segment of ToS. The rise in AI has proven to be a controversial topic for all users on the internet, especially when it comes to generative content. Most of this discontent has been expressed by political participants and artists online and the influx of generated images. This is because generated images are an amalgamation of images, often made of and taken without the consent of their subjects, in order to generate one image.
As of right now, in section 3 of the current ToS, Content on the Services, they state that “by submitting, posting or displaying Content… [users] grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license… to use… and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose. For clarity, these rights include… the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” (X Terms of Service). The updated ToS, said to go into effect on November 15, 2024, leave this section in.
A handful of users have expressed their discomfort in this idea, some already taking down their posts, such as personal information, photos and selfies, and others migrating to other social media platforms. Right now, Bluesky, often abbreviated as Bsky, is overseeing a grand diaspora of X users, especially artists. People on Bluesky have often praised the site for its comfortable atmosphere and its own space for uplifting artists, feats that Bsky users felt that X could not provide.
On the other side of the spectrum, the use of generative content is criticized by all on the political spectrum due to the way it derails discussion. AI generative images have only made propaganda easier to spread, the most infamous case being Trump's Haitian cat fiasco. With the upcoming election week, these kinds of posts only warrant more disorder in such a busy time frame. Poll trends don’t help either now that the results are constantly swinging; it goes to show that nobody is immune to propaganda.
In general, nobody on X is happy right now, both a reflection of the media and how it’s used against people. Lots of events are going on right now, ToS just happens to stir up more discussion for those events, whether they be personal or political. Nobody is really safe from larger powers sapping their content for profit or gain, but it’s why we talk about it. The world keeps spinning round and we’ll continue to have these discussions, see where everyone is at.
Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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