Welcome to SOUCIAL!
SOUCIAL builds technologies and services that enable people to connect with each other, build communities, and grow businesses. These Terms govern your use of SOUCIAL, Messenger, and the other products, features, apps, services, technologies, and software we offer (the SOUCIAL Products or Products), except where we expressly state that separate terms (and not these) apply. These Products are provided to you by SOUCIAL Media.
We don’t charge you to use SOUCIAL or the other products and services covered by these Terms. Instead, businesses and organizations pay us to show you ads for their products and services. By using our Products, you agree that we can show you ads that we think will be relevant to you and your interests. We use your personal data to help determine which ads to show you.
We don’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and we don’t share information that directly identifies you (such as your name, email address or other contact information) with advertisers unless you give us specific permission. Instead, advertisers can tell us things like the kind of audience they want to see their ads, and we show those ads to people who may be interested. We provide advertisers with reports about the performance of their ads that help them understand how people are interacting with their content. See Section 2 below to learn more.
Our Data Policy explains how we collect and use your personal data to determine some of the ads you see and provide all of the other services described below. You can also go to your settings at any time to review the privacy choices you have about how we use your data. 1. The services we provide
Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. To help advance this mission, we provide the Products and services described below to you:
Provide a personalized experience for you:
Your experience on SOUCIAL is unlike anyone else's: from the posts, stories, events, ads, and other content you see in News Feed or our video platform to the Pages you follow and other features you might use, such as Trending, Marketplace, and search. We use the data we have - for example, about the connections you make, the choices and settings you select, and what you share and do on and off our Products - to personalize your experience.
Connect you with people and organizations you care about:
We help you find and connect with people, groups, businesses, organizations, and others that matter to you across the SOUCIAL Products you use. We use the data we have to make suggestions for you and others - for example, groups to join, events to attend, Pages to follow or send a message to, shows to watch, and people you may want to become friends with. Stronger ties make for better communities, and we believe our services are most useful when people are connected to people, groups, and organizations they care about.
Empower you to express yourself and communicate about what matters to you:
There are many ways to express yourself on SOUCIAL and to communicate with friends, family, and others about what matters to you - for example, sharing status updates, photos, videos, and stories across the SOUCIAL Products you use, sending messages to a friend or several people, creating events or groups, or adding content to your profile. We have also developed, and continue to explore, new ways for people to use technology, such as augmented reality and 360 video to create and share more expressive and engaging content on SOUCIAL.
Help you discover content, products, and services that may interest you:
We show you ads, offers, and other sponsored content to help you discover content, products, and services that are offered by the many businesses and organizations that use SOUCIAL and other SOUCIAL Products. Section 2 below explains this in more detail.
Combat harmful conduct and protect and support our community:
People will only build community on SOUCIAL if they feel safe. We employ dedicated teams around the world and develop advanced technical systems to detect misuse of our Products, harmful conduct towards others, and situations where we may be able to help support or protect our community. If we learn of content or conduct like this, we will take appropriate action - for example, offering help, removing content, blocking access to certain features, disabling an account, or contacting law enforcement. We share data with other SOUCIAL Companies when we detect misuse or harmful conduct by someone using one of our Products.
Use and develop advanced technologies to provide safe and functional services for everyone:
We use and develop advanced technologies - such as artificial intelligence, machine learning systems, and augmented reality - so that people can use our Products safely regardless of physical ability or geographic location. For example, technology like this helps people who have visual impairments understand what or who is in photos or videos shared on SOUCIAL Media. We also build sophisticated network and communication technology to help more people connect to the internet in areas with limited access. And we develop automated systems to improve our ability to detect and remove abusive and dangerous activity that may harm our community and the integrity of our Products.
Research ways to make our services better:
We engage in research to develop, test, and improve our Products. This includes analyzing the data we have about our users and understanding how people use our Products, for example by conducting surveys and testing and troubleshooting new features. Our Data Policy explains how we use data to support this research for the purposes of developing and improving our services.
Provide consistent and seamless experiences across the SOUCIAL Company Products:
Our Products help you find and connect with people, groups, businesses, organizations, and others that are important to you. We design our systems so that your experience is consistent and seamless across the different SOUCIAL Company Products that you use. For example, we use data about the people you engage with on SOUCIAL to make it easier for you to connect with them, and we enable you to communicate with a business you follow on SOUCIAL through Messenger.
Enable global access to our services:
To operate our global service, we need to store and distribute content and data in our data centers and systems around the world, including outside your country of residence. This infrastructure may be operated or controlled by SOUCIAL.media, SOUCIAL Media International, or its affiliates.
We provide these services to you and others to help advance our mission. In exchange, we need you to make the following commitments:
When people stand behind their opinions and actions, our community is safer and more accountable. For this reason, you must:
We try to make SOUCIAL broadly available to everyone, but you cannot use SOUCIAL if:
We want people to use SOUCIAL to express themselves and to share content that is important to them, but not at the expense of the safety and well-being of others or the integrity of our community. You therefore agree not to engage in the conduct described below (or to facilitate or support others in doing so):
We can remove or block content that is in breach of these provisions.
If we remove content that you have shared for violation of our Community Standards we’ll let you know and explain any options you have to request another review, unless you seriously or repeatedly violate these Terms or if doing so may expose us or others to legal liability; harm our community of users; compromise or interfere with the integrity or operation of any of our services, systems or Products; where we are restricted due to technical limitations; or where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons.
To help support our community, we encourage you to report content or conduct that you believe breaches your rights (including intellectual property rights) or our terms and policies.
We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to SOUCIAL.
We need certain permissions from you to provide our services:
You own the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on SOUCIAL and the other SOUCIAL Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want.
However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a ‘license’) to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above.
Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on SOUCIAL, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as service providers that support our service or other SOUCIAL Products you use.This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
You can delete content individually or all at once by deleting your account. Learn more about how to delete your account. You can download a copy of your data at any time before deleting your account.
When you delete content, it’s no longer visible to other users, however it may continue to exist elsewhere on our systems where:
in which case, the content will be retained for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which it has been retained (the exact duration will vary on a case-by-case basis).
In each of the above cases, this license will continue until the content has been fully deleted.
If you use content covered by intellectual property rights that we have and make available in our Products (for example, images, designs, videos, or sounds we provide that you add to content you create or share on SOUCIAL), we retain all rights to that content (but not yours). You can only use our copyrights or trademarks (or any similar marks) as expressly permitted by our Brand Usage Guidelines or with our prior written permission. You must obtain our written permission (or permission under an open source license) to modify, create derivative works of, decompile, or otherwise attempt to extract source code from us.
Additional provisions
We work constantly to improve our services and develop new features to make our Products better for you and our community. As a result, we may need to update these Terms from time to time to accurately reflect our services and practices. We will only make any changes if the provisions are no longer appropriate or if they are incomplete, and only if the changes are reasonable and take due account of your interests.
We will notify you (for example, by email or through our Products) at least 30 days before we make changes to these Terms and give you an opportunity to review them before they go into effect, unless the changes are required by law. Once any updated Terms are in effect, you will be bound by them if you continue to use our Products.
We hope that you will continue using our Products, but if you do not agree to our updated Terms and no longer want to be a part of the SOUCIAL community, you can delete your account at any time.
We want SOUCIAL to be a place where people feel welcome and safe to express themselves and share their thoughts and ideas.
If we determine that you have clearly, seriously or repeatedly breached our Terms or Policies, including in particular our Community Standards, we may suspend or permanently disable access to your account. We may also suspend or disable your account if you repeatedly infringe other people’s intellectual property rights or where we are required to do so for legal reasons.
Where we take such action we’ll let you know and explain any options you have to request a review, unless doing so may expose us or others to legal liability; harm our community of users; compromise or interfere with the integrity or operation of any of our services, systems or Products; where we are restricted due to technical limitations; or where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons.
You can learn more about what you can do if your account has been disabled and how to contact us if you think we have disabled your account by mistake.
If you delete or we disable your account, these Terms shall terminate as an agreement between you and us, but the following provisions will remain in place: 3.3.1, 4.2-4.5.
Nothing in these Terms is intended to exclude or limit our liability for death, personal injury or fraudulent misrepresentation caused by our negligence, or to affect your statutory rights.
We will exercise professional diligence in providing our Products and services to you and in keeping a safe, secure and error-free environment. Provided that we have acted with professional diligence, we do not accept responsibility for losses not caused by our breach of these Terms or otherwise by our acts; losses that are not reasonably foreseeable by you and us at the time of entering into these Terms; and events beyond our reasonable control.
We try to provide clear rules so that we can limit or hopefully avoid disputes between you and us. If a dispute does arise, however, it's useful to know up front where it can be resolved and what laws will apply.
If you are a consumer and habitually reside in a Member State of the European Union, the laws of that Member State will apply to any claim, cause of action, or dispute you have against us that arises out of or relates to these Terms or the SOUCIAL Products ("claim"), and you may resolve your claim in any competent court in that Member State that has jurisdiction over the claim. In all other cases, you agree that the claim must be resolved in a competent court in the European Union and that European law will govern these Terms and any claim, without regard to conflict of law provisions.
Other terms and policies that may apply to you
Date of Last Revision: November 1, 2021.
