DALLAS — Symone Redwine wears two hats. She is a lawyer and an influencer.
“My law firm is The Redwine Law Firm,” Redwine said.
She also runs a YouTube channel called “Girl, Is That Legal?”
“Throughout my legal career as both a fashion lawyer, personal injury lawyer and more, I became a professor at the wonderful Thurgood Marshall School of Law,” Redwine explained. “After being a professor there, I realized I didn’t just want to teach to the 15 students in my classroom. I wanted to teach nationally.”
Redwine uses her channel to take tricky legal topics and break them down into simple everyday jargon.
When X, formerly Twitter, announced changes to its terms of service effective Nov. 15, Redwine had worries about the impact.
“I had some serious concerns, both as a lawyer and as an influencer,” Redwine said.
One concern is that the updated terms read, “By submitting, posting or displaying content on or through the services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose.”
“As an influencer, my content is my commerce, right? That’s how I eat,” Redwine said. “These terms here, in effect, tell X that my content is their commerce. They can do what they want, and they don’t have to compensate me for it. That’s frightening.”
The terms also state that data can be used to train their machine learning and X’s AI models.
“What we’re dealing with isn’t just am I not going to get paid, but are you going to take my influence with my demographic and use it to persuade them to do things I didn’t consent to,” asked Redwine.
Dallas attorney Jason Friedman said the terms are very broad. It allows them to use a worldwide use of your content, and it talks about at the end that your payment for licensing all these things to them is your ability to use their services,” said Friedman of Friedman and Feiger Attorneys at Law.
He said their services include more than just posts. “DMs are considered part of their service. If you read the full terms and conditions, it details what services are defined as, and it includes texts,” said Friedman.
The terms also said legal disputes must go to the US District Courts of Northern Texas or Tarrant County courts which both attorneys said are conservative-leaning districts. “That was a decision made by X looking for legal decisions made by more conservative judiciaries,” Friedman explained.
He said it is common for companies to designate courts in user agreements. “They do that usually because that’s their home state and they don’t want to end up in lawsuits in 50 different states with 50 different laws,” said Friedman.
X is moving its headquarters from San Francisco, California to Bastrop, Texas which is just outside Austin, Texas.
“You specialize and require a court because, in the past, that court has given you favorable rulings,” said Redwine. “I’d advise my clients: baby, if you ever see a contract regarding intellectual property that says you need to go to the Northern District of Texas, just tell them no.”
Both attorneys said if you use X, use it at your own risk and fully read the terms.
Some influencers have turned to other platforms such as Bluesky, which was launched in 2019 by Twitter’s former CEO. It became independent in 2021. Bluesky told WFAA that 2.5M people joined their platform in the last week bringing it up to more than 16M users. In a statement, a Bluesky representative said, “We’re seeing record-high activity levels across all different forms of engagement: likes, follows, new accounts, etc, and we’re on track to add 1 million new users today alone.”
We reached out to X for comment and have not received a response at this time.