Tim Samples, Katherine Ireland, and Caroline Kraczon, ‘TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use’, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2023), available at SSRN. Much has been written about ubiquitous online terms of service or terms of use (TOUs). But, as Samples et al write in their forthcoming article, ‘TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use’, TOUs are poorly understood. Their interdisciplinary study examines the ‘law and linguistics’ of 196 agreements for 75 smartphone-based social platforms. Most other studies of TOUs have a law and economics vantage point, but their study combines legal analysis with ‘natural language processing, data science, and corpus linguistics’ (p 5). Corpus linguistics is the ‘scientific study of naturally-occurring language in the aggregate, often in large datasets, so-called corpa’ (p 4). All this means that their study focuses on what matters when thinking about consumer contracts: the language and readability of contracts … (more)
[Nancy Kim, JOTWELL, 24 March 2023]
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