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Twitter: A Vampire That Can Legally Suck the Life Out of You

Simon Dumenco

Oh, those clever birds at Twitter. When the microblogging service announced recent changes to its terms of service, its executives knew exactly how to spin the news. For starters, media outlets dutifully went with headlines along the lines of “Twitter Changes TOS, Opens the Door for Ads,” because in a blog post about the changes, Twitter founder Biz Stone chose to make the most noise about the possibility of advertising. Granted, the actual legal language was rather broad (“The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising … are subject to change.”).

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This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

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