- Amelia Moseley

    I’m one of the weird people who actually reads the terms and conditions, mostly because I need to understand them as a contest creator. Terms and Conditions and Terms of Service are usually pretty basic. Generally speaking, they just say, “Don’t be an awful person on the Internet. There are other people out there.” It really isn’t that difficult of a concept. Just always assume there are really young children there, respect other people’s property, and don’t be hateful. It’s really very easy to just be a decent person. You think more people would get this.

    That said, it’s pretty obvious most people don’t read the ToCs. I don’t blame you. They’re long and dense and use a lot of jargon you probably don’t know, and you just want to update your phone, not read something that is going to make you feel really unintelligent. No, but honestly, ToCs are like 30 pages long. Most people don’t have time for it and just accept a general understanding of what ToCs tend to ask about. Which usually works, because most people are actually decent people online.

    This is common knowledge to a lot of developers. They know you’re probably not going to read all the rules. This is why moderators exist in the online space. This is also why we find easter eggs in ToCs. Yeah, people put easter eggs in their ToCs now to encourage people to read the ToCs. They’re usually little jokes or references. Sometimes people slip in nonsense or ciphers, but it’s usually harmless stuff to give anyone who is actually reading through these rules a little laugh.

    The problem is when, instead of doing something fun like that, you do something like what YouTube has done with their ToCs. If you go to YouTube’s ToC’s about cyberbullying, it says this:

Tell an adult if you remain concerned about another’s actions towards you online.

Go find an adult. Well, I am an adult. Who do I go to? Or are they saying that, if I am an adult, I shouldn’t be complaining or worried about being bullied? The take away to me says if you are an adult, you need to suck it up and grow some tougher skin. Things aren’t supposed to bother you.  That’s not true though. I can be an adult and be bullied. It might affect me less emotionally, and I might know how to handle it better, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be bullied in the first place. To me, this is YouTube saying that once you’re an adult, “You shouldn’t be bothered by this. You’re on the Internet. Just cut your loses.” And that’s awful, really.

    It’s one thing when people just have no clue what a platform’s rules are. That’s easy to fix. Make a condensed version of what people need to know and make them read it, or even provide a short video explaining them. Put a timer based on average reading speeds, or quiz them to make sure they read the important content. A lot of kids’ games use this kind of system, and honestly, it’s something we may need to integrate into other platforms with the way that some people act. If it would improve understanding, that’s awesome. Understandable, a lot of people may take this as an insult to intelligence, but if we're having an issue this much and people are interested in a healthier community, I think it's worth 10 minutes before just rapidly creating accounts. Might also help with spam and bot accounts.

    But on a larger scale, platforms like YouTube need to rewrite their ToCs. The answers they are giving are cutting people who need real help out from being able to get actual answers. They’re systematically supporting the idea that hate it just part of the Internet and that we can’t make it better. Perhaps from a money standpoint, that’s true, but from the perspective of being decent human beings, that is incredibly insulting to people as a whole. And so the largest media platform in the world is aiding in the continued corruption of the digital community.