In corporate culture, the terms of service or use have been rapidly developing into manifestos. They blend moral and ethical beliefs that go much beyond their original purpose of legal protection between company and user.

Corporations have certainly taken on moral issues (Apple and privacy, Target and gender, Chik-fil-A and marriage, &c.) in part because of lax court rulings on their personhood and in part because of the strong political pull of the CEOs at those companies.

It only seems sensible that these rules become enshrined in the terms of service and other cultural artefacts (see for example The Aesthetics of Organization). They’ve grown and so too has our appetite for moral guidance from for-profit entities. Airbnb and other companies have made anti-discrimination and gender policies not only an internal HR practice, but fully-public — and possibly legally-binding — rules that govern not only their own employees but now (and here’s what is so interesting) the behavior of their end users.

People and regular users are regulated now by yet another set rules that govern their behavior on private platforms (mostly for better, maybe for worse), which adds another institutional layer of ethics to human behavior.