Terms of Service

Canon law governed a great deal of European life for centuries. It was law: written, published, interpreted by trained specialists, argued in courts with procedures, and subject to appeal. It was frequently unjust and it was legible.

The rules that now determine what most people can publish, to whom, and for how long, are terms of service. They are private contracts between a company and a user, drafted by the company, amendable by the company at will, interpreted by the company, and enforced by the company with limited recourse.

This is not a claim that platforms are worse than the Inquisition. It is an observation about the form. A great deal of contemporary public expression happens on infrastructure governed by an instrument that has none of the properties we normally require of a rule that carries consequences: stability, publication in a form people read, independent interpretation, and appeal to a body that is not the enforcing party.

The enforcement is mostly automated, at a volume no human process could handle, which means the operative rule is not the written policy but the behaviour of a classifier. Those two can differ substantially, and only one of them is published.

The consequences are also less visible than removal. Reduced distribution, demonetisation, exclusion from recommendation, and shadow limits produce the outcome without the notification. A person can be effectively unpublished while remaining formally present, and cannot tell.

That last property is what distinguishes this from every earlier case in the archive and makes it worse in one specific respect. Someone on the Index knew. The babaylan knew. Apolinario de la Cruz knew exactly which door was closed and why. Uncertainty about whether one is being restricted produces a distinct behavioural effect: people modulate towards whatever they imagine is safe, which is more restrictive than any rule would have been.

The archive should hold two things at once here. Content moderation at this scale is a genuinely hard problem, the alternatives that have been tried are worse, and most of the people doing it are trying to solve real harms. And: the form of the instrument matters independently of the good faith of the people applying it.

There is a specific asymmetry worth naming. When these rules change, they change for everyone at once, retroactively, without transition. A body of work built over years under one set of conditions can become non-compliant overnight, and the appropriate comparison is not to a law but to a landlord who can rewrite the lease.

The remedy available to an individual is unglamorous and mostly consists of not depending on any single platform. Own the domain. Keep the archive on infrastructure you control. Maintain a feed and a list that reach people without an intermediary. Treat every platform as distribution rather than as residence.

That is the paper-road lesson restated for the present. What survives is what exists in more than one place, on something you can still read, in a form nobody else can withdraw.