How Have Platforms’ Terms of Service Evolved over Time?

And the final session at this excellent Social Media & Society 2024 conference starts with Kaspar Beelen, Katherine Ireland, and Tim Samples, presenting a longitudinal analysis of changes to platform Terms of Use. How have such terms changed over time, and how might we quantify and visualise such change? Are such contracts more plastic – mutable – than other types of contract, and are there specific times when they changed substantially?

The overall corpus here contains Terms of Use for some 21 platforms, from 1999 to 2024; building this was challenging and required substantial work with the Wayback Machine and similar archives. After pre-processing, these documents were analysed through sentence-level text embedding, which (for instance) enables pairwise comparisons of sentences in different versions of the same platform’s Terms of Use. This shows both where new sections were inserted or removed, and when substantial changes to the Terms of Use took place.

It is then also possible to see the relative plasticity of the Terms of Service of each platform, as well as the convergence of Terms of Service between platforms as they acquired each other. Other analyses examined the complexity of Terms of Service; Google’s increased substantially in complexity from around 2019 onwards, for instance.

This also reveals specific themes in these Terms – for instance, access to arbitration in case of disputes; or clauses prohibiting content scraping. Clauses on the former are quite similar across platforms; clauses on the latter vary substantially from platform to platform.

Key clusters of change overall are minor revisions (78%), targetted rewrites (9%), and wholesale rewrites (11%). These Terms of Use are more plastic than other contracts, and have grown longer and more adversarial but not necessarily more complex over time – but ultimately this is still typical contract language.