Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses.
On Tuesday, we published an interview with a creator economy attorney.
While editing Natalia’s write-up, I realized I couldn't remember the last time I’d opened the terms and conditions documents for any major social platform.
For today’s issue, I reviewed the terms of service for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Specifically, I looked at what the intellectual property and content sections of these documents could tell us about the relationships among each platform, its users, and the content users upload to each platform.
In this issue:
🤝 Which platforms let you sell or transfer accounts?
🧠 What rights do other users of social platforms have to your content?
🙅 Can you opt out after licensing your content to platforms?
— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor
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How platforms license your content to themselves — and other users
Did you know that anything you post to TikTok, other TikTok users have the right to do essentially whatever they want with it, forever and irrevocably?
You don’t relinquish ownership of the content you post on TikTok, but you do give others creative license to do with it as they see fit.
In my conversation with creator economy attorney Brittany Ratelle for this week’s episode of The Creator Spotlight Podcast, I learned much about the relationship between creators and brands.
We didn’t get as deep into the relationship between creators and platforms, but we spent a moment.
I brought up a legal situation from 2024 that’s central to how I understand the creator-platform relationship. The Onion acquired InfoWars that year, including, so they thought, the associated social media accounts. But X blocked the transfer of InfoWars’ X accounts — they never gave permission for transfers like this in their terms of service.
Brittany had this to say:
“Most [platforms used to] expressly prohibit any kind of transfer assignment, which is what would happen in a sale. Some are now silent on that. And so it's kind of like a no man's land. They're not giving you permission, but they're not on an all-out prohibition.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I read the terms and conditions of any social platform. So this week, I read through the documents on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok for this piece.
Why did I choose these three platforms?
These are three of the five largest by monthly active users (MAU). Facebook and WhatsApp round out the five, but aren’t truly creator platforms. These numbers are from a Statista report covering February 2025:
Instagram: 3 billion MAU
YouTube 2.58 billion MAU
TikTok: 1.99 billion MAU
My goal was to identify patterns across the three documents regarding user ownership of content and accounts.
The TL;DR:
YouTube’s terms are the most creator-friendly of the three
TikTok’s terms are the least creator-friendly
Instagram’s terms sit somewhere in the middle
I am not a lawyer, of course. But the number of apps we use daily has led us — me, certainly — to check countless terms-and-conditions boxes without reading them. This is a reminder to at least skim through them every now and then. See what you’re agreeing to!
On account transfers or sales
Social platform users should be able to sell and transfer their accounts. They already do! A YouTube account is a business; businesses are bought and sold. But as Brittany said, platforms don’t encourage it.
Instagram explicitly forbids account sales: “You can’t sell, license, or purchase any account or data obtained from us or our Service, regardless of whether such data was obtained while logged-in to an Instagram account.”
TikTok has a grey area around account sales: The closest clause I could find was this: “[You may not] impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent you or your affiliation with any person or entity, including giving the impression that any content you upload, post, transmit, distribute or otherwise make available emanates from the Services.”
YouTube appears to allow account sales: I could not find any clause that forbids account transfers. Nor could I find any explicitly allowing it.
YouTube is the winner here. Instagram at least states its preference — I’d like to see TikTok include a clearer clause here.
On a platform’s right to use your content
It’s the basic price of entry to use an otherwise free platform. They need to be able to display your content in various places and move it through various pipes for the platforms to work.
You retain content ownership as a user, but they can do pretty much whatever they want with it.
Instagram does not “claim ownership of your content, but you grant [them] a license to use it.” They make sure to add: “consistent with your privacy and application settings.”
TikTok similarly claims a right to use your content. Specifically: “By posting User Content to or through the Services, you waive any rights to prior inspection or approval of any marketing or promotional materials related to such User Content.”
YouTube also claims the right to use your content. Specifically: “By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content […] in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business […]”
What rights do other users have to your content?
This was the wildcard for me. Remix culture was by no means invented by TikTok, but the platform will go down in history as a significant accelerator on the way people use other people’s creative outputs as a raw material for their own creative output.
This clause in TikTok’s terms raised my eyebrows more than any other across all three documents:
“[…] and to authorise other users of the Services and other third-parties to view, access, use, download, modify, adapt, reproduce, make derivative works of, publish and/or transmit your User Content in any format and on any platform, either now known or hereinafter invented.”
If TikTok wills it, anyone can do whatever they want with your content, whenever and wherever they like.
Your continued execution is your advantage — not the intellectual property itself.
Instagram has no clause remotely similar to this, but YouTube does grant certain licenses to other users. You grant “each other user of the service” license to your content in various ways, but “only as enabled by a feature of the service.”
That license does not allow the user to “make use of your Content independent of the Service.” YouTube lets other users do plenty with your content within their platform. TikTok lacks that boundary!
What if you want to opt out?
To some extent, by deleting content (or an entire account) from a social platform, you can opt out of the license you’ve given that platform to your content. To some extent.
Instagram is the clearest and thus most creator-friendly here. Your content will be deleted within up to 90 days after you request it, with an undefined backup period as well. Until your content is deleted, they retain all usage rights.
YouTube, again, is relatively creator-friendly. After you delete your content, its license remains available for a “commercially reasonable period.” Vague, but bound by “reasonability.”
TikTok is the least creator-friendly, once again. The license you give them to your content is “irrevocable” and “perpetual.” They cite a “commercially reasonable period,” like YouTube, but YouTube never licenses your content so extensively in the first place.
How does that Eagles song go? “You can check out, but you can never leave.” Platformworld is forever.
