Decentralized social network Mastodon is updating its terms of service, categorically prohibiting the use of user data for training large language models. The new rules will take effect on July 1, 2025.
G. Ostrov
Social network Mastodon is taking radical steps to protect its users' data from being used in artificial intelligence systems. Mastodon gGmbH has announced a cardinal update to its terms of service, which will take effect on July 1, 2025.
What Changes in Mastodon's Rules
The main innovation concerns a categorical ban on "extracting user data for unauthorized purposes, such as archiving or training large language models (LLMs)". This means that companies engaged in AI development will no longer be able to use data collection tools on the main Mastodon.social server.
Platform users have already received email notifications about the upcoming changes. The new terms are aimed at protecting the privacy and intellectual property of community members.
Federated Nature and Limitations
It's important to understand that Mastodon represents a federated network consisting of many independent servers. The new rules apply specifically to the Mastodon.social server, which is managed directly by Mastodon gGmbH.
Users of other independent servers in the Fediverse ecosystem will receive similar protection only if the administrators of their instances adopt comparable terms of use.
Raising Age Restrictions
In addition to the AI training ban, a new requirement for users' minimum age is being introduced. Now, joining Mastodon requires reaching 16 years of age instead of the previous 13 years.
Context: The Battle for Data in the AI Era
Mastodon's decision comes amid growing disputes between social platforms and AI-developing companies. Recently, Reddit filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing it of unauthorized use of platform materials for training the Claude neural network. According to the lawsuit, this involves more than 100,000 requests to the resource since July 2024.
Such measures reflect growing concerns among users and platforms about how their data is used for commercial development of artificial intelligence technologies without explicit consent.
Official Mastodon website: https://mastodon.social
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