TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use

Abstract

Online terms-of-use (TOUs) are the most widely used form contracts in human history. But TOUs are as poorly understood as they are ubiquitous. Their proliferation has fueled a yawning gap between contract law and consumer reality. The notion that users read and understand online TOUs, disproven in academic research, is the subject of pop culture mockery. Yet contract law assumes something very different. Because classic legal doctrines apply to online contracts, consumers routinely find themselves legally bound to contracts they have not—and often could not—read.

In this article, we evaluate the law and linguistics of a critical area of consumer contracting: smartphone-based social platforms. Our interdisciplinary study examines an original dataset of 196 contracts (TOUs, privacy policies, and community guidelines) for seventy-five apps. Our analysis highlights a decoupling of contract doctrine and consumer reality in the smartphone age of online contracting. Our results show that this divergence is fueled by extraordinary volume, complexity, and asymmetries in platform-to-consumer contracts. In addition, our results offer evidence that the decoupling has grown in recent years.