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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Technology
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Legally, they absolutely do not. Regardless of how shitty it is, a user has no rights whatsoever to anything on these platforms. Doesn't matter if you've had an account on Twitter since day one, have a million followers, and because of that facilitated tons of ad revenue for the platform. Literally none of it belongs to you in any tangible or legal way.
These are chickens that people never believed would come home to roost. These social media companies have been around for so long and feel like such major players that people don't think about things changing, and what that change means when they've built entire communities or businesses on these platforms. This is what happens when you build a life or career on a foundation you don't control. The rug can be pulled out from under you at any time, and you have no recourse whatsoever.
You're not even a tenant to these companies. You are not the customer. You're the product they serve up.
Many banks have features and services that require a minimum average daily balance and/or a certain number of transactions each month. Plenty of them have inactivity fees. And they'll tell you that you signed papers agreeing to these things. Are those agreements valid? Doesn't matter. Can you afford to sue a billion dollar banking and investment company to find out?
N.B.: I'm not endorsing these practices. Just describing the reality of them. Social media is a cancer. Capitalism is killing the planet. And all these problems lay therein.
The reality is that we often don't know what rights we have until we attempt to take them to court and see if they carry weight. At some point companies move into the territory of fraud. The question is where that line is. This could well land on the wrong side of the line if a few judges decide it's not reasonable.
Ehh it's not that simple either way.
Like, platforms don't actually own your data and usually explicitly state so; if for no reason other than not having liability for what you post.
If they did actually own the data (beyond having the very broad license to use it) they'd also have to curate 100% of it, otherwise they'd get sued to oblivion by copyright holders and whatnot.
someone's never seen an "inactive account" fee
SWIM lives in such a country, and recently got hit by a "virtual fee" for account inactivity. Since it isn't a "real fee", it doesn't increase debt, which would be illegal, but the bank will still happily apply it the moment SWIM were to ever put any money in the account.
SWIM looked around the web, and there are more people who got hit with that out of the blue... after they apparently introduced the "functionality" in 2018, but decided to "delay it" until 2023 because of COVID and stuff.
Calling it a "virtual fee" and just letting them sit there without doing anything, allows the entity to claim having more clients than they actually have, and look like it's being owed more that it will ever get paid.
Ownership of identifiers, that includes usernames, is regulated by Trademark laws.
If you keep using a moniker, like a username, to conduct trade under it, and/or have it registered as a trademark (which requires you to use it in trade or lose it), then you can legally claim it.
Otherwise, Twitter or any other platform, can do whatever they want with it.
Correct. What decides the rights, is the use. A registered but unused mark loses the rights, while a used but unregistered one keeps the rights (just becomes harder to prove).
And it needs to be used for trade. Like, someone's personal nick, not used for trade, would have no rights. But the nick of someone using it to be an influencer, or a furry artist, would give them some rights.