Mastodon Bans AI Model Training in Latest Terms Update to Protect User Privacy

In a bid to protect user privacy and prevent unauthorized use of their data, social networks are tightening their terms of service against scrapers and bots that crawl their websites to train AI models. Just days after Elon Musk-owned X updated its terms to explicitly prohibit AI model training, decentralized social network Mastodon has followed suit by updating its own rules to bar any kind of model training.

In an email sent to users, Mastodon stated that it explicitly prohibits the scraping of user data for unauthorized purposes, such as archival or large language model (LLM) training. The social network wants to make it clear that training LLMs on the data of Mastodon users on its instances is not permitted. The new terms, which will be applicable starting July 1, have legal language that prohibits any data extraction and development of an automated system.

The new rules state that users cannot use, launch, develop, or distribute any automated system, including spiders, robots, cheat utilities, scrapers, offline readers, or any data mining or similar data gathering extraction tools to access the Instance, except in cases where it is the result of standard search engine or Internet browser and local caching or for human review and interaction with Content on the Instance.

It’s important to note that these terms apply only to the Mastodon.social server, which is only one of the instances on the fediverse, a distributed network. This means that scrapers could still extract data from other servers and use it to train AI models if they don’t explicitly bar that in their terms of service.

Other platforms, including OpenAI, Reddit, and The Browser Company, have also added similar clauses to their rules to prevent other companies from training models. Apart from this change, Mastodon is also enforcing a new age limit of 16 for users. The social network had an age limit of 13 for users in the U.S., but it is changing the age limit globally.

With these new measures in place, social networks are taking a stand against the misuse of their user data and ensuring that their platforms are used for legitimate purposes only. By banning the use of user data for AI model training and enforcing age limits, these platforms are protecting their users' privacy and ensuring that their platforms are used responsibly.