A Terms of Service is normally ignored by everyone, it’s not a very interesting thing that people want to read. When people see the Terms of Service pop up on their screen or the option to read it, they tend to scroll right past the terms to the section where it asks them if they agree to it. They just want to get back to what they want to do. They don’t think much about what they’re doing on the website or what terms they could potentially be violating. They don’t think about how much they should or shouldn’t be posting online and the consequences that comes with it.

A photo of the words “Terms of Service” typed a type writer by Markus Winkler

I decided to do parody of what Terms of Service are by poking fun at what they are intended to, how people view them, and what actually happens.

— — —

By agreeing to these Terms, you are responsible for your use of the Services and any content you have provide.

You must be at least the legal age of 16 years old to use our services. If you are younger than 16 years old and continue to use this service anyway, you are setting yourself up and whatever happens, we don’t want anything to do with it.

We will be gathering and using the information you input into our systems for our benefit. It’s nothing too drastic, just gathering everything we need to potentially use against you in the future and sell to someone that we’re not entirely sure will use with good intentions. Our systems are totally 100% safe and our firewalls can not be bypassed. Wherever you heard otherwise or happened a few years ago, old news.

On the topic of information and data, we would greatly appreciate that you wouldn’t sell any of the content someone else has posted. It belongs to them and them only… but if we can’t find an incredibly obvious link to it and them, then maybe we’ll allow it.

The content you post is (hopefully) created by you, posted by you, and for who you want to see. Of course we won’t use it, it is yours, but.. if we like it we may use it for an ad or someone else will. If we get caught, we’ll deny it.

We or may not wrongfully accuse you of breaking the terms of service and you may or may not want to fight back. Good luck with that. Unfortunately for you, we have the power and will win every time. Yes, we do have some people at the company that flag innocent content compared to others that are incredibly worse but we will always protect them before you. You posted about the safety of thousands and we took it down? Whoops, sorry that’s too graphic for this platform plus, nobody wants to see that. Here, look at this woman that is baring all and advertising it for money, it’s getting thousands of likes, we are sure you’ll like it.

Feel free to stop using our services, we will feel free to get rid of your account. Maybe if you read this all the way through and followed the rules, maybe things would

An image of the inside of a court room by David Veksler

If these terms are violated, expect a series of consequences to be issued in the order of:

1. A warning regarding the term(s) that was broken
2. A temporarily disabled account
3. An increased temporarily disabled account and/or decrease of content exposure to other users
4. A permanently deleted account
5. Immediate court action between the company and the accused user

We are aware that you may think these consequences seem drastic but unfortunately for you, you didn’t read the terms of services beforehand thus leaving you uniformed about the content that we allow on this platform and continued to do whatever you want, believing that you are safe. Well guess what? You weren’t safe and we caught you. See you in court.

— — —

We can poke fun at the Terms of Services in the world and how they aren’t always the best and how ridiculously long they can be all we want but it has to be taken with a grain of salt or with the knowledge that this is something important we’ve been ignoring for years.