this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Legally, they absolutely do not. Regardless of how shitty it is, a user has no rights whatsoever to anything on these platforms. Doesn't matter if you've had an account on Twitter since day one, have a million followers, and because of that facilitated tons of ad revenue for the platform. Literally none of it belongs to you in any tangible or legal way.
These are chickens that people never believed would come home to roost. These social media companies have been around for so long and feel like such major players that people don't think about things changing, and what that change means when they've built entire communities or businesses on these platforms. This is what happens when you build a life or career on a foundation you don't control. The rug can be pulled out from under you at any time, and you have no recourse whatsoever.
You're not even a tenant to these companies. You are not the customer. You're the product they serve up.
Many banks have features and services that require a minimum average daily balance and/or a certain number of transactions each month. Plenty of them have inactivity fees. And they'll tell you that you signed papers agreeing to these things. Are those agreements valid? Doesn't matter. Can you afford to sue a billion dollar banking and investment company to find out?
N.B.: I'm not endorsing these practices. Just describing the reality of them. Social media is a cancer. Capitalism is killing the planet. And all these problems lay therein.
No, the user absolutely does have rights to things on the platform. For example, reddit likes to talk big about "their data", but in fact this data belongs to the users. Reddit claims an extensive licence to the data users provide them, but that data belongs to the user that created it.
It is akin to copyright. An artist has full ownership of the material they create, while their music label or whatever has rights to distribute it. So a media organisation can sell music rights to a dodgy politician for their election campaign, and that is legitimate, but it is still the artist's work. In this example, the artist has already agreed to and been paid for the use of their work.
Like I say, just because a business puts it in their terms and conditions, that doesn't mean it is legitimate. Just because it hasn't been properly challenged, just because people haven't yet thought of it as worthwhile to jump through the legal hoops, does not mean it is legitimate, let alone right.
Contracts require consideration. If I give you Intellectual Property rights to something I create, you must give me something in return. "Access to a website" is not really consideration - the website is free to access, regardless of whether I contribute, thus it cannot be taken as reasonable consideration in exchange for the value I provide. You should pay me if you profit from my work.
Websites and digital enterprises have got away without paying users for a long time. When it started, it didn't seem like there was any significant value to any of it. Now, businesses like Facebook and Google have taken that "valueless" data and exploited it so much as to place themselves amongst the wealthiest organisations in the world - it is abundantly clear that user data does have value, even if that value requires work to be derived.
It also requires work to build a car, but you still have to pay for the nuts and bolts. Users should be paid for the nuts and bolts they provide, which digital businesses merely collect, then use to manufacture their product.
This really needs to be emphasised:
The user is not the product. The user is the supplier of raw materials. The supplier deserves to be fairly paid.
It does become a little different with usernames. In this case, the platform would normally claim ownership of usernames, which, per their terms can conditions, have no value (you're not allowed to sell your account). However, when the business starts to place tangible value on the usernames that people have invested time in - beyond that of shady 3rd party websites that breach the terms of the website the username comes from - then things become fair and reasonable game for legal challenges.
The usernames would have no value if it weren't for the users that held them. If Twitter/X reclaimed all the usernames and started selling them, people wouldn't buy them for any significant amount, they would go to another platform and impart value there instead.
This is nothing but the latest example of sociopathic assholes trying to see how much shit they can get away with taking for free. Just because no one notices the theft, that does not mean no theft has been committed.
The reality is that we often don't know what rights we have until we attempt to take them to court and see if they carry weight. At some point companies move into the territory of fraud. The question is where that line is. This could well land on the wrong side of the line if a few judges decide it's not reasonable.
Ehh it's not that simple either way.
Like, platforms don't actually own your data and usually explicitly state so; if for no reason other than not having liability for what you post.
If they did actually own the data (beyond having the very broad license to use it) they'd also have to curate 100% of it, otherwise they'd get sued to oblivion by copyright holders and whatnot.