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= The Biggest Lie On The Internet = The Biggest Lie On The Internet is an Internet meme that took its origin in the contractual term "terms and conditions", and is more commonly known online as "I agree to the terms and conditions". Most websites, including social media sites, require users to agree to legally binding terms of service (ToS) and privacy policies upon sign-up or entrance. ToS and privacy policies are frequently complex and legalistic. As a result, users often do not read them. Thus, “I agree to the terms and conditions” is referred to as the biggest lie on the internet. One of the original iterations in circulation of this meme included an image of Ancient Aliens host Giorgio A. Tsoukalos with capitalized white text as a caption overlapping the image, titled: "The biggest lie on the internet is I agree to the terms and policies of this website".

Origins
The exact origins of the statement "The Biggest Lie On The Internet" are unclear. In 2012, Pär Lannerö wrote in a report for the CommonTerms project "I have read and agree to the terms and conditions" is the "biggest lie on the Internet" according to countless tweets and blog posts” This suggests the statement emerged as a meme at some point online. CommonTerms was a project aiming to reduce the need for consenting to online terms without good reasons. CommonTerms launched biggestlie.com (now offline) in January 2012. CommonTerms was a project launched by Metamatrix AB in 2010 ​​a defunct web agency originating in Stockholm, Sweden that produces digital concepts and web solutions. This project was funded by the Internet Foundation in Sweden (Internetfonden) for several years. Due to other assignments, MetamatrixAB has not updated the full project website since 2015.

The Project
According to Lannerö, the CommonTerms project started with the intention of solving the problem of non-accessible online legal texts in a way similar to how Creative Commons made different copyright licenses accessible. The main problem, as stated by Lannerö is that "nobody reads the Terms and Conditions", and that "the Terms are usually not by far as accessible as the online services they apply to". Lannerö's report discusses "The Biggest Lie on the Internet" (the terms and conditions) and provides the following consequences of the Terms and Conditions:

Users getting exploited
"Most agreements have been formulated only by providers, and therefore not protecting the interest of users. Providers can keep writing whatever they like in the agreements as long as nobody reads them. Even if the terms are fair, some users will regret having signed the agreement because they were expecting something else ."

Users Get Excluded
"Some users who do not want to accept an agreement they cannot understand or do not have the time to read will stay away from great services, thus reducing market size and contributing to the digital divide ."

Limiting value
"Some users, not knowing the terms, will be restrictive in their use, and only get limited benefit from the services. How fun would a social network be if you didn't trust it with some personal data ?"

Wasting time
"Some users spend a lot of time actually reading the agreements, and service providers spend time writing for almost nobody ."

Lessening competition
"Websites and other online services should be able to compete with great terms and agreements, but today that's hard because nobody has a clue what they agree to ."

Eroding respect for contracts
"Some users may become less respectful of agreements in general, having ignored so many of them ."

According to a report by The Swedish Consumer Agency (Konsumentverket), many people do file complaints after having agreed to things they did not known they had agreed to, so the problem is real and not just a curiosity.

Consent
The concept of consent comes from a field of theoretical and empirical inquiry in various disciplines. In relation to information technologies, consent is mostly associated with privacy and data sharing. Current approaches (e.g. agreeing to Terms and Conditions) are rooted in the idea of individual control. Terms and conditions are central to acquiring user consent by service providers. Due to the nature of complicated legal documents such as the terms and conditions, there is a question of accessibility and discourse on the validity of consent given the highly lengthy and complex wording provided in terms and conditions. For example, in the United Kingdom, half of the adult population has a reading age that is below that of a 14-year-old. Despite this, documents key to this process of consent continue to pitch at a graduate level. This places doubts on the validity of "informed consent".

According to a report by The Swedish Consumer Agency (Konsumentverket), many people file complaints after having agreed to things they did not know they had agreed to. This raises the larger question of the validity of consent, as users often feel there is no real alternative, as well as there is a lack of real influence over online terms of service. Half of the participants in a study viewed a 200-word notice of a change in Terms of Service for less than eight seconds before clicking to accept or reject it. This finding strongly suggests the correlation between the lack of engagement with such notices.

Given this, consent becomes unclear when dealing with licensing agreement features such as the clickwrap or the browsewrap.

The Clickwrap
Often, this type of informed consent is presented on websites and social media platforms in the form of a clickwrap, which is a digital prompt that facilitates consent processes [usually agreeing to the terms and conditions] by affording users the opportunity to quickly accept or reject digital media policies. This clickwrap typically comes as a small box at the bottom of an initial sign-up page or as a pop-up upon initial entrance to a website.

There are multiple reasons why people might not pay close attention to a legal document like the Terms of Service. Some people cite the complexity and length of the document to be overwhelming, while others mention that because everyone they know is using the website or social media platform, it creates an automatic trust that it "must be okay".

Terms of Service and privacy policies, like the ones found in a clickwrap, serve more purposes than just being documents for approval or denial from the user. These documents presented in the clickwraps frequently include details that invite users to question the terms and conditions and offer contact details for those who wish to address these questions or concerns. These documents also typically reference relevant laws, shedding light on users' rights and the backing of institutions in case of disputes. Sometimes, they mention civil liberties groups that advocate for rights and freedoms, offering additional support channels for users. Moreover, they often link to resources that assist users and their advocates in addressing their issues effectively. Consent materials are thus multifaceted, providing guidance, legal context, and avenues for support and action.

The Browsewrap
The newest iteration of online contracting is the browsewrap. The term browsewrap can refer to merely browsing a website, using a website, or to making a specific transaction which originated on the website. For example, a user who visits Bing.com to search for a website will have entered into a EULA [end-user license agreement] with Terms and Conditions included. Unlike the act of clicking in a clickwrap, an agreement becomes enforceable once the user moves beyond the homepage of a website. The act of moving past the homepage is seen as an automatic acceptance of the terms and conditions of the website. For example, upon entering YouTube, clicking on a video will create an automatic contractual binding agreement between the user and the website, as it immediately moves the user past the homepage. Legal cases concerning browse-wrap agreements in the past ten years show that websites mostly do not communicate the terms and conditions adequately to the users.

Timeline
Before Internet use became commonplace, the software industry sparked major controversy in the 1990s by issuing EULAs in the form of Shrinkwrap licenses. A Shrinkwrap license refers to the contract paperwork that software manufacturers shipped. The software would usually arrive packaged in plastic film (Shrinkwrap) with a sticker across the front or a user manual listing the conditions for use of the software. The Terms and Conditions would usually contain wording similar to the now infamous licensing language below from ProCD’s national directory CD listings as they shipped in 1996, which later sparked a lawsuit over the legality of the licensing agreement. Typically, the detailed licensing agreement was found within the packaging's plastic wrap, encompassing all the Terms and Conditions common to standard contracts. However, the caveat was that by the time the user gets to read the contract, they have already agreed to its terms by breaking the seal. Occasionally, the license may allow a grace period, often ten days, where the user has the option to return the software and reject the agreement.

With the rise of the internet, a new type of EULA emerged, called the clickwrap. Upon opening a software, a clickwrap license would appear to a software user as a single screen or a series of screens where the user would need to click an on-screen button stating that the user has read the Terms and Conditions of the software and its use and accepted the licensing agreement This form of licensing agreement can be seen upon entrance to almost any website or social media platform on the Internet. The newest form of this type of licensing agreement is the browsewrap.

Controversy
Due to the nature of clickwraps and browsewraps, there is discourse present across fields about the controversies relating to how users understand informed consent on the internet, and how they engage with it. Participants in a study noted that the social media site's join button is much more noticeable than the links to its policies, indicating a possible economic strategy by the platform. They believed this difference reveals a deliberate attempt by the company to minimize user interaction with the policy acceptance phase. Another participant expressed the view that reading policies seemed unnecessary since the social media platform “doesn’t make me go through it .” Additionally, the contrast between the prominent "JOIN" button and the less noticeable policy links was highlighted by another participant, raising suspicions that this design choice might be intentional to subtly gain users' agreement. This participant pointed out the absence of a conspicuous option to access the Terms of Service, implying a deliberate effort to divert attention from it. Moreover, clickwraps were described by another individual as potentially deceptive, giving a false impression of security, and possibly concealing undisclosed aspects of the service. In another study from 2006 found that even when users read the policies they often did not agree on their meaning. There are broad implication in the terms and conditions documents, thus resulting in potential misunderstanding. Research has repeatedly shown that users do not read T&Cs and hence any notion of having obtained “informed consent” is problematic.

It's essential to recognize that the terms of service agreed upon by previous users of a platform, like Google or Instagram, serve as a prerequisite to accessing the service; agreement to these terms is mandatory for anyone wishing to use the platform. If the user, upon entering the website, rejects the agreement proposed through the clickwrap, the consequence must be that he or she cannot gain access to whatever the agreement protects or applies to.

"The Biggest Lie On The Internet"
Because of its controversy, the clickwrap quickly became a commonly considered problematic licensing feature, thus becoming a topic of heavy conversation not only amongst technologists and researchers/scholars, but also everyday Internet users. From here, the meme "the Biggest Lie On The Internet" was born. When a software user clicks "agree", it suggests that the user not only accessed, read, and understood the policies before they agreed to them, it also suggests that all the implications of this agreement was also understood.

This statement alone has created a degree of debate. Some users suggest that the term “lie” might not be correct in this context, suggesting that agreeing to policies is required for participation online. it is suggested that clicking the "I agree" button while not accessing, reading, understanding, and acknowledging the content can be considered a direct "lie". Others suggest the term "lie" isn't correct because of the acknowledgement that people accept policies without reading them all the time.

CommonTerms
In 2010, MetaMatrixAB started the CommonTerms project with the intention to solve the problem of non-accessible online legal texts in a way similar to how Creative Commons made different copyright licenses accessible. CommonTerms began research by analyzing the existing agreements of more than 20 different kinds of websites. With this project, the common terms of the agreement documents were analyzed. The project concluded that of the 22 websites analyzed, there were over 450 different terms that were used, thus, the ambition of creating easily accessible symbols was shown to be impossible, according to CommonTerms: "Making thousands of icons would not be practical, especially given their often quite abstract nature". Inspired primarily by the Nutrition Label project, CommonTerms instead proposed a standard tabular format for one-screen summaries of Terms & Conditions.

Understanding The Biggest Lie On The Internet Project
York University associate professor and researcher Jonathan Obar, along with fellow researchers Valeta Wensloff and Andrew Hatelt created a project that aims to bring awareness to "The Biggest Lie On The Internet". The project is called "Understanding The Biggest Lie on the Internet Project". The project aims to raise awareness to the issue of clickwraps and browsewraps, and address the problematic nature of such a licensing agreement.

Deceptive Patterns
DeceptivePatterns, an initiative founded by Harry Brignull in 2010, seeks to tie together deceptive patterns in software with the laws that they break and the enforcement actions that have resulted from their use. DeceptivePatterns aims to arm employees with facts about deceptive patterns on the Internet. According to the DeceptivePatterns website, "[the] site has played a pivotal role in shaping the conversation around ethical design practices. Its concepts and terminology have been adopted in new laws and regulations around the world, including the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA), California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and many others. Regulators have also taken a keen interest and it is becoming an increasingly common topic in class action lawsuits.

Forced Action
According to DeceptivePatterns, "Forced action involves a provider offering users something they want - but requiring them to do something in return. It may be combined with other deceptive patterns like sneaking (so users don't notice it happening) or trick wording (to make the action seem more desirable than it is). Sometimes an optional action is presented as a forced action, through the use of visual interference or trick wording. In cookie consent interfaces, forced action is sometimes carried out through "bundled consent". This involves combining multiple agreements into a single action, and making it hard or impossible for a user to selectively grant consent. " This can be seen in clickwraps upon clicking "I agree". Furthermore, if a website is essential for the Internet user, rejecting the agreement may not always be possible, thus, the user is essentially forced to click accept to be granted access.

Obstruction
DeceptivePatterns, explains that "Obstruction is a type of deceptive pattern that deliberately creates obstacles or roadblocks in the user's path, making it more difficult for them to complete a desired task or take a certain action. It is used to exhaust users and make them give up, when their goals are contrary to the business's revenue or growth objectives. It is also sometimes used to soften up users in preparation for a bigger deception. When users are frustrated or fatigued, they become more susceptible to manipulation. " This can be seen in clickwraps when agreeing to the terms and conditions is the only way through to a potentially essential website. Users are presented with a lengthy legal document, that may exhaust most users.

Trick wording
According to DeceptivePatterns, "The trick wording deceptive pattern takes advantage of user expectations and ambiguous language to mislead and deceive users. It is normal for users to scan-read when they are online, as a way to cope with the sheer volume of information they are faced with. This means they don't read and dwell on every word on every page. Trick wording usually takes advantage of the scan reading strategy, by making a piece of content look like it is saying one thing, when in fact it is saying something else that is not in the user's best interests. " This form of "deception" may be seen commonly in licensing agreements in clickwraps, as the wording is often confusing and non-understandable. ". The lack of resources (temporal, social, cognitive, or material) of single individuals to cope with these imbalances are amplified by the demand to manage complex issues through one-click consent.

In Popular Culture
The statement "Biggest Lie On The Internet" became an internet meme in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

American television show South Park discussed the issue with clickwraps in an episode originally airing in 2011, where the main character, Kyle Broflovski, clicks "agree" on an iTunes user agreement without reading it, resulting in then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs forcing him to be an unwilling participant in his latest project, called the HUMANCENTiPAD.

A documentary film released in 2013 called Terms And Conditions May Apply addresses the main question here, "what exactly are we agreeing to?" says filmmaker Cullen Hoback. The film explores how companies and governments make use of personal data submitted by individuals during the use of websites, the installation of apps, or the online purchasing process.

The Social Dilemma, a documentary drama film released in 2020 highlights the dangers of social media and discusses privacy concerns. The film's premise is investigating how individuals are being watched, manipulated, and misled, and presents perspectives from technologists, researchers and activists.