Twitter users are seeing a pop-up about new terms of service going into effect at the social media hub. And once they do on Sept. 29th, say goodbye to Tweets.
Among the adjustments in the refresh is the removal of all references to the word “Twitter” in favor of Elon Musk’s preferred “X”. That includes changing the name of retweets to “reposts”.
Also gone is any reference to Periscope, the live streaming app that Twitter owned, but shut down in 2021.
The update also reinforces some of the legal protections around Musk and Twitter/X. Starting later this month, users will “waive the right to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action, collective action or representative action proceeding” to the extent permitted by law, the update says.
That caveat comes just days after Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for billions, blaming that advocacy group for the site’s loss of advertisers.
Artificial intelligence is wrapped into the changes, as well, with the site saying “crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited.” Previously, Twitter said crawling the site was permissible in some circumstances, though it did forbid scraping.
Musk has been equally vocal on his opposition to artificial intelligence companies “scraping vast amounts of data” from the site, which has led to some users being met with error messages reading “rate limit exceeded.”
And it appears Musk’s plans to collect additional personal information from some users is moving forward. Updates to the privacy policy discuss the collection of biometric information and employment history.
Musk might want to erase the Twitter name, but even this update fails to do so entirely. While you won’t see the word Twitter in the Terms of Service or Privacy policy, many of the links within those documents point to a twitter.com URL.
