Terms and Conditions Apply

Facebook, Twitter, and whatever else arrived with a promise that felt almost generous: here is a place for everyone, free to join, free to use, free to share whatever you like. The welcome was warm and the interface was clean. It took a few years before the terms became legible—before you understood that "free to share whatever you like" carried a lengthy asterisk, that "everyone" excluded specific categories of nipple and political opinion, and that the platform’s generosity existed primarily to make you dependent enough that leaving would mean losing everything you’d built there. By then, of course, you’d already moved in.