· rreck
What They Took Out, and Put Back: A Clause Timeline of Three Terms of Service
Terms of service are revised for two decades, and clauses come and go. Scoring every archived revision of YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter against the same 34 consumer issues — and measuring how much each revision changed — surfaces what a single snapshot hides: rewrites that leave the length untouched, and clauses removed for years that quietly return. YouTube's terms drop machine-learning language in the 2010s and bring it back, spelled out, in July 2022 — a revision that replaced 92% of the document's wording with a net length change of 21 words.