If you haven’t checked into your Twitter account for a while, you probably wouldn’t recognize it. For one, there’s a new owner and a new name: “X.” There are more changed headed this way, too. A new TOS document that took effect on November 15 shows that X owner Elon Musk can use your tweets and media to train Grok, his new AI bot.
Changes to X TOS
There have been so many defections already from X – 700,000 in the week directly following the U.S. presidential election. But all the defections may not be courtesy of the election results. There are many who aren’t happy with the direction of X and the new Terms of Service.
Think about the stuff you have posted to Twitter and X throughout the years: opinions, thoughts, pictures, videos, all content that is meaningful to you for some reason. Basically, this stuff could be personal. You may not even remember what you posted in the beginning.
However, everything you posted is about to become fodder for an AI bot. X released a new Terms of Service document that went into effect on November 15. Neither X nor Musk announced it, but according to the TOS, the social network has the right to use everything you have posted to your account to train Grok, an AI bot.
While there may be an option to opt out of your content being used, now that the TOS has gone into effect, it no longer matters.
You know what happens with TOS. How many times have TOS documents been presented to you as a change in terms or when signing up for something new? Do you always read them before you click accept? I admit that I don’t. I just go ahead and click. If you do that when you open X, your stuff now belongs to X and Musk.
Other Changes to the TOS
That was far from the only alarming change to the TOS. If your account accesses more than one million tweets in a day, you’ll be fined $15,000. Of course, neither you nor I will be accessing that many. But others have a reason to access that many for other purposes, such as tracking or research. In other words, Musk can do whatever he wants with your content, but you don’t have those same privileges with everyone else’s.
Additionally, you don’t have much recourse if you disagree with any of these changes but choose to stay a part of X. The only option to fight it will be with Musk in court. Who do you think the judge will side with?
If you choose to stay a part of X, you will leave yourself wide open. You may want to be like many others and delete your X account. You also may want to follow others who moved out of Musk’s house and onto Bluesky. It will never be the old Twitter again.
Musk became emboldened when his candidate became the leader of the U.S. again and awarded Musk with a government position. There’s no holding Musk back now. He opened X up to former users who’d been kicked off, and it’s become an unrecognizable social network that doesn’t seem so social and is losing its network.
Image credit: Unsplash. All screenshots by Laura Tucker.
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