So, given recent discussions about Pillowfort, I thought it would be interesting to add them in, and also to look specifically at explicit content wording, because that has been something really under discussions recent for obvious reasons.
I also included the clauses about the circumstances under which your accounts can be terminated, because that’s something I’m not sure most of us really think about.
Has a pretty general statement on this: “We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law.” What services consider “illegal” in a post-SESTA/FOSTA age is, as we’ve already seen, anyone’s guess. I couldn’t find anything else about it, though, so it looks like Google Drive is only going to get concerned about “illegal” stuff (which isn’t all explicit content, but rather usually very particular subsets, although I am by no means a porn-law expert).
Google “may stop providing Services to you … at any time”
As discussed above, prohibits the uploading of anything “pornographic” (among other things), and then describes what it means by pornographic in fairly detailed terms (aside, but I always love how the policies against pornography require me to read so much more about porn than the sites that let porn in expose me to lol)
deviantART has the right to terminate your account if you violate the terms of service, as determined in their sole discretion
AO3 was founded with a goal of maximum inclusiveness, so it’s probably not surprising that it’s got very few content limitations. Most of those have to do with uploading things that aren’t creative works (like classified information or instruction manuals), with the one notable exception that child pornography involving images of real children is not permitted.
As far as I can tell, AO3 seems to have a super-detailed intense process before it removes most content or suspends an account.
Wordpress doesn’t allow pornography, which it defines broadly as “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts.”
Wordpress retains “sole discretion” to terminate your access to its site “for any reason.”
Dreamwidth kind of goes the Google route, in that it sets its limits at illegality. That’s a lot of inclusiveness.
But Dreamwidth follows it up with a very broad clause giving it “sole discretion” to remove content “without limitation.”
It does limit its ability to terminate accounts to violation of its terms of service, although again that is determined in DW’s sole discretion.
Standard licensing clause, Pillowfort doesn’t own your stuff, etc.
Pillowfort has a pretty long list of things it excludes from its site. A lot of those seem to be geared toward hate speech and abuse. (Other TOS’s have stuff about this as well.) The one governing sex that I can see is: “Posting sexual, violent, or otherwise offensive content, persistently and in an unrelated community or tag (i.e. ‘spamming’) with the intent to offend and disturb other users.” There’s been talk about child pornography standards, which aren’t in the TOS, although there is the general catch-all that you can’t upload illegal things.
Pillowfort reserves the right to terminate your account at its sole discretion. It provides examples of why it may terminate the account but it doesn’t restrict itself to only terminating in those circumstances.
Now, all those discretionary termination clauses don’t mean those sites are going to run around behaving that way. But it does mean that as users we’re a little bit at the mercy of the site. They *do* have the power to terminate us for any reason. Whether or not they exercise that power is entirely up to them. I haven’t read exhaustively in this area but Facebook has been sued over account termination and basically courts in the cases I’ve read have said, “Look, they can do whatever they want to your account, it says so right in the terms of use.”
(usual caveat, none of this is legal advice, and hey, I might be reading these wrong, they’re long and not always organized in a way that makes sense)
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