If you’ve been using Twitter, you’ve likely seen people flocking to Bluesky, a social platform hailed as a promising alternative to the now sick bird app. It looks almost identical to Twitter, was it Initially funded by Twitter(Opens in a new tab), and calls itself the “microblogging social network,” which is funny because that’s exactly what Twitter is. In any case! Before you go running for greener Bluesky pastures, it is important to know what you are agreeing to when you sign up for the platform.
Bluesky currently owns everything you post
On Thursday, April 27, Twitter user Ashley Gjøvik chirp(Opens in a new tab) About the troubling Bluesky General Terms of Service(Opens in a new tab). She tweeted several screenshots of the tern, including an excerpt that read “If you post any Content to Bluesky Web Services, you hereby grant Bluesky and its licensors a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, publicly display and perform the Content.” modify, sublicense, and distribute it, on or in connection with Bluesky Web Services.”
In plain English, this means: We own everything you post.
Rose Wang, who works in Strategy and Operations at Bluesky according to her LinkedIn profile,(Opens in a new tab) Respond to Gjøvik’s screenshots with an explanation of how the Bluesky team intends to interpret the terms: “For it to work, we need to be able to promote the app,” Wang wrote.
This means that we will take screenshots for Bluesky, which will include your users’ content. However, our community has explicitly told us that if we are using your content in a way that you do not consent to, please email us… and we will do our best to accommodate your wishes. Bluesky so that users own their data, developers are never banned from the ecosystem, and creators can always own the relationship with their users…thus, we do our best as (a) team to honor our ethics…soon, our Terms of Service will spell out use cases to mitigate confusion.”
It all looks nice. But terms of service agreements amount to a binding contract, and tweets that claim the company is “trying their best” to use your content in a certain way do not.
Is Bluesky the best? The Twitter alternative is taking off.
These terms are harsh, even compared to Facebook
Let’s take a look at the Facebook Terms of Service,(Opens in a new tab) which is more accurate in its interpretation of user rights. The terms page reads “You retain ownership of the intellectual property rights”. “Nothing in these Terms removes the rights you have in your Content… However, to provide our Services, we need to give us certain legal permissions (known as a “license”) to use that Content.”
Facebook’s Terms document outlines what the license covers, and notes that it only applies “specifically when you share, post, or upload content covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products.” The document also provides a useful example: If you post a photo, you’re giving Facebook some necessary permissions, allowing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to copy, store, and share it with others in ways that are “consistent with your settings.” Reassuringly, he notes, the license you grant “will expire when your content is deleted from our systems.”
Maybe Bluesky is protecting itself because it’s new
Compared to Facebook’s terms, Bluesky reads like a first draft drawn up to satisfy a legal team, and the platform will likely start qualifying users and, for its part, claimed the CEO(Opens in a new tab) Basically that’s what happened. You know what they say in tech: move fast, break things, and claim ownership of users’ content!
Wang’s responses point to another persistent topic: copyright. “We must protect ourselves,” she wrote. According to Wang, the journalists were “taking screenshots of the app and putting them in their posts,” and the terms required that “content licensing rights be transferred to them.” In the case of moderation, the role of copyright comes back again, Wang said. Bluesky must be able to legally transfer content to moderators “so they can screen the content” and filter out objectionable material.
These terms may have downsides for Bluesky herself
But owning user content and being able to transfer rights to that content, may mean that BlueSky is not protected by Safe Harbor(Opens in a new tab)“Provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under the DMCA, safe harbor protection disappears if a company has “the right and the ability to control(Opens in a new tab)Content that infringes and could benefit from copyright. This means that these terms make Bluesky vulnerable to costly litigation for copyright infringement, which could drain the potential of the emerging app.
For all its promise, however, Bluesky is still very much a work in progress. And while it’s never fun to read in small print, it’s worth taking a quick look before handing your content over to Bluesky.
Mashable has reached out to Bluesky’s CEO for comment, and will update if we hear back.