Terms and Conditions
Last updated
1. Agreement
These terms govern your use of Take a Stance (“the site”). By using the site you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the site. There is no account to close and nothing to cancel — closing the tab is sufficient.
2. What the site is
Take a Stance is a free, anonymous opinion game. It shows debated questions, records whether readers agree or disagree, and displays the resulting totals worldwide and by country. It is provided for interest and entertainment. It is not journalism, research, polling, advice, or a service you may rely on for any decision that matters.
3. Who may use it
The site is intended for readers aged 16 and over. It discusses politics, religion, relationships, health and other adult subjects, and it does not filter questions to be suitable for children.
4. No account, and what follows from that
The site has no sign-up and no login. Your progress lives in your own browser, and clearing your browser data or switching devices will lose it. Nothing you do here can be restored by the operator, because there is no record connecting any of it to you. See the Privacy Policy for the detail.
5. The results are not a poll
This is worth being explicit about. The percentages shown move with real answers given on this site: a question starts from a baseline reading rather than an empty bar, and every answer given here shifts it from there. Nothing is weighted or filtered in anyone’s favour. The figures are also, and equally truthfully:
- self-selected — they describe people who chose to come here and answer, not any population;
- unverified — nobody proves who they are, how old they are or where they are;
- repeatable — because answers are anonymous, the same person can answer the same question more than once, and the site cannot detect it;
- approximate as to country — a country is inferred from an IP address, which VPNs, proxies and mobile networks routinely get wrong.
Do not cite these figures as survey data, and do not present them as representing the opinion of any country or group. They represent the people who answered.
6. Questions are prompts, not positions
Every question on the site is chosen because reasonable people disagree about it. Publishing a question is not an endorsement of any answer to it, and the short arguments shown for and against each question are written to present each side fairly, not because the operator holds either view.
You will encounter questions you find wrong, uncomfortable or unfair to a position you hold. That is the nature of a site built on contested questions. If you believe a question is unlawful, defamatory or hateful rather than merely disagreeable, please report it — see section 15.
7. Suggesting a question
The site accepts suggested questions from readers. By submitting one you confirm that:
- it is yours to submit, and submitting it infringes nobody’s rights;
- it contains no personal information about you or about any other identifiable person;
- it is not unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful, obscene, or an incitement to violence;
- it is not advertising, spam, or an attempt to promote anything.
Submissions are anonymous and are read before anything is published. Most are not published. By submitting a suggestion you grant the operator a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, edit, translate, publish and distribute it as part of the site, in any language, without attribution and without payment. You keep whatever rights you had in it; you simply also allow it to be used here.
8. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- automate, script or otherwise manipulate answers, likes or counts, or attempt to distort the results by any means;
- circumvent rate limits, probe for vulnerabilities, or disrupt the service or the infrastructure it runs on;
- scrape the site at a volume that burdens it, or systematically reproduce its questions, arguments or figures as a dataset or a competing service;
- use the site in breach of any law that applies to you, or to submit anything you are not entitled to submit.
Access may be rate-limited or blocked where any of this is detected, without notice.
9. Quoted excerpts
Some results display short excerpts from public discussions elsewhere on the internet, illustrating each side of an argument. They are quoted anonymously, without usernames or links to individuals, in a length appropriate to quotation and comment, and they are translated where the original was in another language. They are the words of their authors, not of the operator; they are used under the exception for quotation, criticism and review rather than by permission; and their appearance is not an endorsement.
If you wrote something that appears here and you would like it removed, write to contact@takeastance.world with enough detail to locate it. It will be removed without argument.
10. Intellectual property
Three different things sit on this site, and they are not owned in the same way. Nothing below is created by these terms: both copyright and the database right arise automatically, and this section is notice of what already applies rather than a claim being staked.
The site itself
The code, the design and the interface are the operator’s own work and are protected by copyright.
The collection
The body of questions, the short arguments beside them, their translations into fourteen languages and the corpus of verified excerpts were assembled at substantial cost — in obtaining the material, in checking it, and in presenting it. That investment is protected in its own right by the sui generis database right under Directive 96/9/EC, independently of whether copyright subsists in any individual sentence. Extracting or re-using a substantial part of the collection, by hand or by machine, infringes that right on its own.
What is not the operator’s
The excerpts described in section 9 belong to the people who wrote them. They are reproduced here under the exception for quotation, criticism and review — not by permission, and under no claim of ownership — and their translations are likewise derived from those authors’ words. Section 9 says how to have one removed.
What you may do
Read the site, link to it, and quote briefly from it with attribution. You may not copy it wholesale, republish its questions or arguments as your own, systematically extract its collection, or build a derivative or competing service from it, without written permission.
11. Availability and changes
The site is provided as it is, when it is available. It may change, break, lose data, or stop existing at any time, without notice and without liability. Features may be added or removed. Questions may be edited or withdrawn, and figures may be corrected or reset where a fault or manipulation is found.
12. Disclaimer and liability
The site is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including as to accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted availability.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator is not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential or special damages, for loss of data or profits, or for any decision taken on the basis of anything shown on the site.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, you keep all the rights the law of your country of residence gives you, and nothing here reduces them.
13. Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of the European Union member state in which the operator is established, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you use the site as a consumer resident in the European Union, you may also rely on the mandatory consumer protection rules of your own country, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of your own country. For consumers in the EU, the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform is available at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.
If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remain in force.
14. Changes to these terms
These terms may be updated. The date at the top of the page says when they last were. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms.
15. Contact
contact@takeastance.world — or see the Contact page for what to include.