The Verge
X really wants you to forget about Twitter — and that includes in its terms of service. Users are starting to see pop-ups about new terms that go into effect on September 29th, and one adjustment is two instances of “retweet” (the only use of “tweet” in the current terms) to “repost,” essentially putting the final stamp in the death of the word tweet.
There are a bunch of other branding changes in the new terms, including a nearly wholesale removal of the word “Twitter” in favor of X. I say nearly wholesale because, hilariously, many of the URLs included in the terms still seemingly have to include the word “twitter,” like in this link to a developer-focused website: https://developer.x.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites. There have been some hints that X wants to fully switch over to URLs starring X, but it seems Twitter will hang around in some capacity. (It’s worth noting that X.com still redirects to twitter.com.) References to Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming app it shut down in 2021, have been removed as well.
There are a few other updates to the terms, too. One says that by using X, “to the extent permitted by law, you also waive the right to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action, collective action or representative action proceeding.”
Another change moves language about misusing Twitter’s services to a new section, and updates it in a pointed ban against scraping, something that X owner Elon Musk really doesn’t like.
The current terms say:
NOTE: crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without our prior consent is expressly prohibited
The new terms say (emphasis ours):
NOTE: crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited
Sure, that says that somebody could scrape if they have written consent. But I can’t imagine that permission is something X is going to be handing out very often.
X is also planning to put a new privacy policy into place on September 29th. That new policy says X will expand the volume of data it collects on users, including biometric data and employment history.
