TikTok's Grammatical Fraud
And my letter addressing it under ADA
ABSENT INTENT OR AUTHORITY AS LEGAL ADVICE:
TikTok,Inc., is attempting to pull some shenanigans with its new and updated Terms of Service, by creating liabilities and “warranties” that they want the user to assume and guarantee.
Without going into a long monologue, here’s a tidbit: “You warrant that any such contribution does comply with those standards, and you will be liable to us and indemnify us for any breach of that warranty. This means you will be responsible for any loss or damage we suffer as a result of your breach of warranty.”
Ask any real estate agent of the serious implications of the words “warrant” and “warranty.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg, because they are playing games with the word “commercial”. They’re putting themselves in a position favorable for the US government to censor, based on classifying their services, as first “non-commercial,” and then as a “Commercial Items” as per 42 CFR §2.101 and, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I did a search for “Commercial Items” and NOTHING equaled that search term. (Note that TikTok had quotation marks around this, indicating to any reasonable person that this was the actual, specific term defined in the above mentioned code.)
So, for me, it looks like that TikTok buckled to the US government, and basically put in a back door for the strong-arm techniques of any rogue agent wanting to claim something breached some commercial law (and likely crafted just for this occasion) .
With my disability, the thing that I noticed is that these Terms Of Service, as most of these type of agreements are, contain grammatical fraud. Here’s my letter about this, but first I will predict that TikTok will plausibly force their graphical user interface to prompt the users to accept the new terms of service by May 19, 2023. I bet that the prompt will say “I agree” or use the pronoun “I”, when these Terms of Service do not define or give meaning to “I”.
It’s all smoke and mirrors, and thankfully, the ADA can break a few mirrors.
(I already know I have an error on Item #4 on the letter. I have a communication disability, and I’m extremely tired. Go figure.)
Here’s the letter.
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
And Page 4:
I’ll keep you posted.
You fuckers should really join this substack, if you’re not already a member.