Concerns about Twitter granting news media the right to run your videos notwithstanding, almost nothing has changed in the Twitter TOS. Mostly moderation terms are being clarified, partly in response to right-wing propaganda panic over "shadowbans".
This is a screenshot of the old/current terms of service, which includes the exact language that people are warning about as being "new".
The ability to sublicense our content covers Twitter for embedded tweets in news stories and the like.
The ability to sublicense our content covers Twitter for embedded tweets in news stories and the like.
Twitter might suddenly start selling our videos to news companies outside the Tweet infrastructure, I don't know. But that would be a significant shift in policy, and mostly redundant since they already allow tweets to be embedded basically anywhere.
I'm not saying a social media site would never make a drastic change that utterly upends their model and screws the pooch completely (RIP, Tumblr) but all of Twitter's "license and sub-license" stuff is there to support the way Twitter is used and spread now.
This page contains the New For January Terms Of Service at the top and if you scroll way down you will find a big heading identifying the current terms of service. The use of content section is virtually identical.
twitter.com/en/tos
twitter.com/en/tos
I'm not saying "Trust Twitter" and I'm not saying "Trust Fox News" but if Fox News signs a deal with Twitter that lets them extract videos from Twitter and run them as if they're their videos, it will itself be news, and absent that there's no infrastructure for individual videos
and so even with the "changed" Terms of Service the point of contact for news channels to acquire a video from Twitter is still the rights-holder, not Twitter. There's no one at Twitter to field that call.
The TL;DR here is:
1. Twitter has the right to show people your tweets.
2. This is not limited to "on Twitter dot com"
3. They also reserve the right to not show people your tweets.
1. Twitter has the right to show people your tweets.
2. This is not limited to "on Twitter dot com"
3. They also reserve the right to not show people your tweets.
As a Twitter Content Creator, I can tell you that the "sub license and repackage" thing is definitely NOT new because those of us who have used Twitter as our primary outlet have already lost audience and money to, for instnace, thread compilation sites.
I periodically search Google News for my Twitter handle just to see where I've ended up.
How I feel about the tweet-embedding phenomenon and the ways it gets used are more complicated then "It's good" or "it's bad". If they didn't allow and enable embedding tweets, we'd all be getting screen shotted. Or quietly plagiarized. Which also happens.
But from the point of view of somebody who depends on a growing audience for income, embedded tweets at least lead people back to me. And to Twitter as a platform. In this regard, my interests align with Twitter's so I "trust" them to not strip my content that far out of context.
When news sites link to or embed tweets that contain newsworthy videos, it boosts Twitter's brand as the place where news happens. If they just start selling video to Fox News or whatever, the revenue they gain from that comes at the expense of that, and future videos unposted.
"But why are they explicitly giving themselves the right to alter tweets?"
Because your tweets will look different on different screens and devices and in different devices.
"And translate?"
You've never noticed the Translate This Tweet button?
Because your tweets will look different on different screens and devices and in different devices.
"And translate?"
You've never noticed the Translate This Tweet button?
When somebody Quote Tweets your tweet and it cuts off the end of it? That's an alteration. When your picture is cropped differently depending on where/how it's viewed? That's an alteration.
That's what all that talk about an evolving ecosystem or however they phrased it means. They want Twitter to be a platform for *nimble* content, for tweets that "have legs". That's how things go viral, and viral content boosts their brand.
And again, I don't "trust" Twitter to not shoot themselves in the foot or me in the head here. Corporations aren't great at long-term, big picture enlightened self-interest stuff. Social media companies are great at poisoning the wells they drink from.
But the specific stuff being held up as a change is literally not new, and is not currently being used by Twitter in the ways people are fearing, and I would expect if they were going to change how they use our content, the section on how they use our content would change.
Right: The new terms of service, regarding use of content. Left: The old/current terms of service, regarding use of content. You can read them line by line. Again, this is taken from twitter.com/en/tos
I ran them through a text comparer and found only two differences:
"(for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating)" is added
and a clarification to the existing "no compensation" clause that use of Twitter is our only compensation.
"(for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating)" is added
and a clarification to the existing "no compensation" clause that use of Twitter is our only compensation.
They're not claiming any new rights or describing any new uses.
You can feel however you want to feel about the idea that use of Twitter is itself a reward for having Good Content, but it's not like before they were offering us a dollar for every RT over the first hundred.
