Tweeting to Totality: Critical Textual Analysis of Twitterrs Terms of Service

Abstract

When afforded access and literacy, today’s public has the opportunity to engage in a whole terrain of mediated practices enabled by digital technology and the Internet, including varied forms of social media, user-generated content, and video streaming from over-the-top providers like YouTube and Hulu. In just about every one of these instances users have granted permission to the terms of use or service agreements, including their broadband provider, social media site, smartphone application and GPS service. Research suggests that consumers pay very little attention to such agreements and often bypass reading them completely if at all. But ironically, such terms of use and service agreements and their disclosure confer a bundle of rights and legal provisions to providers. In legalese, these arrangements generally take the form of non-negotiated contracts of adhesion and more or less define providers’ relationships with their users. Sociologically, arrangements such as these are completely social and thus warrant attention to the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic conditions that structures, maintains, and constrains the provider-user relationship.While much of the discussion on terms of use agreements focuses on the legality of such contracts, scholarship neglects just how comprehendible these agreements are for average laypersons. Even if a user takes the time to review these click wrap agreements, admittedly there is a high degree of jargon and verbosity that often obfuscates not only the reading but meaning of such terms of use or service. To help better illustrate these concerns this paper seeks to explore the following research questions: How do non-negotiated terms of use agreements effect the provider-user relation? Does the provider-user relationship, as influenced by non-negotiated terms of use agreements, resemble the power-prestige structure of a society? This paper thoroughly applies critical textual analysis to Twitter’s terms of service, rules and privacy policy. As one of the top five social media sites with 645 million users, Twitter represents a diverse demographic of adult online users in terms of gender, age, race, education, geographic location and income and serves as one of many examples of a widely used platform that requires users to consent to a terms of service agreement. Specifically, critical textual analysis is used to examine how these agreements structures the provider-user relationship to resemble the power relations and social inequalities typically found in a society structured by power and prestige. We argue that the non-negotiated contract or terms of agreement is neither mutually consensual or beneficial. Even though the Internet is celebrated for its decentralized structure, we illustrate that the social arrangement of the terms of use agreements is not democratic – but imperialistic and capitalistic. Within this vein, the words, content and context rendered in the terms of the contractual agreement are not typically understood by majority of users.