Leigh. I like brains #Neuroscience Mountains and books make me happy. If you don't like Slytherins, come and fight me (you'll find me in Canada 98% of the time)
It’s quite likely no coincidence that that most ‘mismanaged’ and least profitable social media site is also the one that turned out to be most amenable to the formation of actual communities
To clarify, Tumblr is indeed horribly mismanaged, but notably, it’s mismanaged both in ways that harm us (e.g. doing little about pornbots, nazis, etc.) and ways that have greatly benefited us – not asking for real names, hiding our follower counts, a chronologically-sorted dashboard, etc. are big draws, but in the eyes of other social media monarchs, they look like unforgivable mistakes. If I don’t have to give my real name, that’s that much less information to sell to advertisers. If posts are listed chronologically, Tumblr can’t shove the posts of ‘influencers’ in front of me willy-nilly. Tumblr was a ‘success’ because it was too poorly managed to sufficiently atomize us, and so we actually had conversations and communities instead of being the best products for advertisers.
Everyone is panicking over TOS-es right now as they find a new home as Tumblr gets flushed down the toilet. I don’t like those random TOS breakdowns because the analysis is always wrong.
Anyway this is what people pay me to do and I will now do it for $0 because I’m tired of everyone spreading misinformation. This post is not a substitute for legal advice etc. Reblogs are appreciated because I literally see TOS nonsense on my dash every day.
Any more experienced copyright lawyers please feel free to weigh in - it’s part of my field yes, but my wheelhouse is more film production COT rather than derivative works.
Google doesn’t have rights to do whatever they want to files you upload to Google Drive
Their TOSes are annoyingly broad in drafting but essentially boilerplate clauses that they need to host your work, use google translate on it, make it searchable etc. They cannot steal your fanfic. They cannot modify your art and use it for whatever.
Your work MAY be threatened (that is, deleted) thanks to FOSTA/SESTA, which imo is a clown provision signed by a clown that sent safe harbour down the toilet. This and this has more information (I’ve skimmed but not perused both), but the tl;dr is: similar to Tumblr, there was a ham-fisted attempt to protect victims of sex trafficking and all it really did was make cloud based services start deleting user files whether relevant or not.
Uploading work to dA doesn’t give them a license to sell it to Hot Topic. This post is incorrect. Debunked here and corrected by the artist himself here. Your art is safe.
There’s a breakdown of the TOS in there that’s pretty much wrong on most points, if someone wants me to do a not-wrong version, ask. This may help.
All you really need to know is that like Google, I checked it over and nothing in there puts you at risk for dA asserting ownership over your work or selling it - they need those rights for thumbnails, search functions, resizing etc.
Yum. I like this one. Easy to read and clearly explained for most people with basic reading comprehension. Section G - What We Do With Content will tell you everything you need to know.
Basically, they have the same clauses about you granting AO3 a license to modify/apart/etc you work, but they take the trouble to explain to you exactly what that means, and how they use it to improve accessibility etc.
No history of content purges as far as I know. Explicit content is allowed with limits eg. no child porn.
Same deal - you’re looking for 1. Wordpress - Responsibility of Contributors, with the exact same thing as everybody else. They also do a decent job of explaining what they use the license for (though once again, it’s standard), albeit not as beautifully as AO3.
Same old standard licensing clause, again doesn’t let them steal your stuff.
Incredibly…open content policies…you can basically do whatever you want so long as you don’t break laws or commit fraud it seems? If I’m wrong, feel free to correct.
Hope this helps. Feel free to force me to read and explain any other site TOS documents. Again, more experienced copyright lawyers, feel free to correct me if I clowned up somewhere.
reblogging as a correction to my last post re DevArt, although since
DevArt
still doesn’t allow adult art, still not a great alternative to tumblr
@earlgreytea68 this seems like something you might be interested in
Thank you!
So, given recent discussions about Pillowfort, I thought it would be interesting to add them in, and also to look specifically at explicit content wording, because that has been something really under discussions recent for obvious reasons.
I also included the clauses about the circumstances under which your accounts can be terminated, because that’s something I’m not sure most of us really think about.
Google Drive
Has a pretty general statement on this: “We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law.” What services consider “illegal” in a post-SESTA/FOSTA age is, as we’ve already seen, anyone’s guess. I couldn’t find anything else about it, though, so it looks like Google Drive is only going to get concerned about “illegal” stuff (which isn’t all explicit content, but rather usually very particular subsets, although I am by no means a porn-law expert).
Google “may stop providing Services to you … at any time”
deviantART
As discussed above, prohibits the uploading of anything “pornographic” (among other things), and then describes what it means by pornographic in fairly detailed terms (aside, but I always love how the policies against pornography require me to read so much more about porn than the sites that let porn in expose me to lol)
deviantART has the right to terminate your account if you violate the terms of service, as determined in their sole discretion
AO3
AO3 was founded with a goal of maximum inclusiveness, so it’s probably not surprising that it’s got very few content limitations. Most of those have to do with uploading things that aren’t creative works (like classified information or instruction manuals), with the one notable exception that child pornography involving images of real children is not permitted.
As far as I can tell, AO3 seems to have a super-detailed intense process before it removes most content or suspends an account.
Wordpress
Wordpress doesn’t allow pornography, which it defines broadly as “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts.”
Wordpress retains “sole discretion” to terminate your access to its site “for any reason.”
Dreamwidth
Dreamwidth kind of goes the Google route, in that it sets its limits at illegality. That’s a lot of inclusiveness.
But Dreamwidth follows it up with a very broad clause giving it “sole discretion” to remove content “without limitation.”
It does limit its ability to terminate accounts to violation of its terms of service, although again that is determined in DW’s sole discretion.
Standard licensing clause, Pillowfort doesn’t own your stuff, etc.
Pillowfort has a pretty long list of things it excludes from its site. A lot of those seem to be geared toward hate speech and abuse. (Other TOS’s have stuff about this as well.) The one governing sex that I can see is: “Posting sexual, violent, or otherwise offensive content, persistently and in an unrelated
community or tag (i.e. ‘spamming’) with the intent to offend and disturb other users.” There’s been talk about child pornography standards, which aren’t in the TOS, although there is the general catch-all that you can’t upload illegal things.
Pillowfort reserves the right to terminate your account at its sole discretion. It provides examples of why it may terminate the account but it doesn’t restrict itself to only terminating in those circumstances.
***
Now, all those discretionary termination clauses don’t mean those sites are going to run around behaving that way. But it does mean that as users we’re a little bit at the mercy of the site. They *do* have the power to terminate us for any reason. Whether or not they exercise that power is entirely up to them. I haven’t read exhaustively in this area but Facebook has been sued over account termination and basically courts in the cases I’ve read have said, “Look, they can do whatever they want to your account, it says so right in the terms of use.”
(usual caveat, none of this is legal advice, and hey, I might be reading these wrong, they’re long and not always organized in a way that makes sense)
Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”
I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.
I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”
Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.
Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.
It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.
Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:
Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.
Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.
Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.
Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”
TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:
You do not respect their rights as an individual.
You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.
You probably haven’t been listening to them.
Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.
Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.
I love this post.
Too many parents wonder why their kids aren’t honest with them, and never realize their own non-receptive behavior and their failure to listen are the reasons why.
At one point or another, a child WILL keep a secret from you, but if it’s to a point where all their emotional feelings are being poured away from you as opposed to toward you, it’s probably because you haven’t been emotionally trustworthy or open.
Adultism :(
not to mention, you then take away one of your child’s coping mechanisms. if your parents read your journal, you’re never writing in it again. if your parents monitor your conversations with friends, you won’t tell them when you’re depressed anymore. if you have a therapist that reports what you say to your parents, you won’t tell that therapist anything. now all those methods of venting, feeling better, self-soothing, sorting out your issues, and feeling safe are gone.
“i want information” is not synonymous with “i want my child to talk to me.” those are two separate goals, but i think parents conflate them – i want my child to talk to me, but since they won’t, i’m stealing information from them. no. you didn’t ever want them to talk to you. you wanted information. if you wanted them to talk to you, if that was your entire end goal, you would have approached things completely differently. stealing information from a child ensures they will never talk to you again. but if all you want is information, then you can take it however you want and call it a parenting success.
if what you wanted was a child who talks to you, you would apply the same principles you do to literally any other human interaction in your life, and cultivate a relationship and trust.
I had to stifle my horror and revulsion at my last job, when a conversation about removing the door from a child’s bedroom came up, and I was only one not in favor of it.
May be worth noting I was the only millennial in a conversation that was otherwise full of baby boomers.
In 1927, Paramount Studios had this funny map, detailing which parts of California could substitute for which global locations. It was too expensive to fly around the world to film their movies. So they made California into the world.
Africa on the coast, huh? SEEMS LEGIT.
Wow the whole continent looks like the central coast?
I have a habit of waking up my boyfriend with news alerts but I think this morning I’ll let him sleep just a little bit longer before mentioning we’re officially back in the Cold War
U can tell that skincare culture is makeup culture disguised bc not a single syllable of it is directed at men, the crustiest people on this earth
the fucked up thing is, when 12 yr old girls with perfect child skin but maybe a puberty zit or two see those commercials telling them that even slightly flawed skin is a problem to be aggressively fixed and start scrubbing the shit out of their face with high pH drugstore cleansers and astringent toners, they destroy their skins natural moisture barrier and make their skin more permeable to bacteria which can actually CAUSE acne, when creates an endless cycle of spending where they spend the rest of their lives desperately trying to fix the problems that the products caused in the first place
