Facebook’s terms of service were ranked the most difficult to understand among the top 10 social media platforms.
Research firm All About Cookies submitted the full text of Facebook’s terms into the Hemingway Editor app, which found the terms were written for a 16th-grade-level reading comprehension. This is an increase in difficulty since parent company Meta updated the terms last month, adding almost 1,000 more words and increasing one grade level in reading difficulty.
“The language is dense and complicated enough to fit right in with texts assigned in 400-level college courses,” All About Cookies wrote in a press release.
FACEBOOK PARENT META REPORTS FIRST-EVER DECLINE IN REVENUE IN SECOND QUARTER
One Facebook representative pointed out that while the terms of service scored poorly, the platform’s privacy policy, something important to users, has a better score because it was updated in May.
Meta updated its privacy policy using the Flesch-Kincaid scale, a representative told the Washington Examiner. Its previous data policy scored around the collegiate level, while the updated privacy policy scored at the secondary school level.
The Flesch-Kincaid scale gives a text a score between 1 and 100, with 100 being the highest readability score. Scoring between 60 and 70 is equivalent to eighth and ninth grade, with Facebook’s new privacy policy scoring within the ninth grade level. This policy was translated into 60 languages with shorter sentences, fewer syllables, and easier-to-understand word choices in mind.
Among WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, TikTok, Discord, and Reddit, the average reading level required to understand all terms of service is a 14th grade level. The average person in the United States reads between a seventh and eighth grade level, according to the Center for Plain Language. All of Meta’s platforms required reading comprehension higher than that of a high school graduate, with Instagram ranked at a 13th grade level and WhatsApp rated at a 14th grade level.
YouTube has the shortest terms of service, at just over 3,000 words, and also the simplest, requiring an 11th-grade-level reading comprehension. All About Cookies identified 67 of 210 of the terms’ sentences as “very hard to read.” Reddit and Snapchat were the only other two platforms with terms that did not require collegiate-level comprehension.
YouTube’s parent company Google did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.
Reddit had 134 “very hard to read” sentences out of its 373. Snapchat has the longest terms of service at over 10,000 words, which adds up to about 40 minutes of reading.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Facebook had 96 out of 180 sentences that were very hard to read, TikTok had 133 out of 295, and Twitter had 105 out of 248 sentences.
