14 DAY TRIAL // With the huge influx of users and attention, Twitter is also attracting the “wrong crowd” to its service and spam and all manners of unwanted messages. Twitter has been taking some steps in that direction and now it's also updating its Terms of Service to help fight them, while also touching up on other areas like advertising, APIs and tweet ownership, though none of the changes is in any way spectacular or controversial.
“Now that we know more about how Twitter is being used, we've made changes to our Terms of Service—these are the basic rules that go along with using Twitter. The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership. For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter. With these revisions, we expect some discussion so here are a few highlights from the updated page,” Co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a post clarifying some issues with the new ToS.
Stone went on to highlight some of the changes that might interest more users. Advertising is now more clearly fleshed out in the ToS, as Twitter wants to keep all revenue options opened, while it has no clear plans of introducing ads to the service anytime soon. Stone also wanted to clarify the tweet-ownership issue, just to be on the safe side, but this is not a change to the ToS. All tweets belong to the ones that create them, however, Twitter has the right to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” them, which it has to do in order to operate.
Continuing on that note, the new ToS also underline the fact that third-parties are authorized to use the content via the APIs Twitter makes available. However, the microblogging platform is working on a new set of guidelines for the developers that use the APIs. Finally, behavior that is considered abusive or spam is also addressed in the new ToS, so that users are more aware of the rules that Twitter has set up for these issues.