Terms of use

These terms are an agreement between you and Critically Research LLC(“we”). They cover this website and the RE: browser extension. Using either means you accept them.

You must be 16 or older to make your own account. Younger students may use Critically only through a managed account created by a school or organisation.

You own what you write. Nothing here transfers copyright, and we do not claim any.

You give us a licence to store your work, show it to the people you have chosen to show it to, include it in search on this site, and make the technical copies that hosting requires. The licence is limited to running Critically. It is worldwide and royalty-free because servers and readers are, and it ends for anything you delete, except where clause 5 says otherwise, which is the one place it matters.

We will not sell your work, licence it to anyone else, put advertising against it, or use it to train an AI model.

A citation is a claim that a page says what you say it says. Quote accurately, and do not misrepresent what a source supports. Citing a page you disagree with is normal and encouraged; describing it dishonestly is not.

Marking a citation as supporting, refuting or giving context is your judgement, and it is published under your name.

This works differently from most sites, so it is worth reading.

A note only you hold is deleted outright. It goes, with its citations and reviews.

A note other people put on their boards can instead be abandoned. Your name comes off it and you stop being associated with it, and the note itself stays where those people put it. We do not reach into somebody else's work to remove something they chose to keep, and an abandoned note is nobody's to edit afterwards: not yours, not theirs.

Deleting your account withdraws your name from everything. Where a copy of your work survives on someone else's board, it carries no attribution to you.

If something has to come off entirely, whether because it is unlawful or because of the rules on writing about people, that is what the report form is for, and staff can remove it outright.

Public notes can be copied into your own notebooks. Attribution follows the note: the original author is credited wherever it goes.

The reverse does not happen. The original author is never told who copied their work, and there is no count or list of who did. Taking a public idea and building on it is the point; being watched doing it is not.

When a page is cited here we keep a copy of its text and a screenshot as it was on that date, and we re-check it afterwards so readers are told when it changes. We only archive pages that are publicly reachable, we identify ourselves as a crawler, and we respect robots.txt.

Those copies exist so that a citation can be checked, including after the page has changed or gone. They are shown alongside the claim they support, with the source named and linked. We believe this is a fair use, and we accept that a court has not told us so.

If you own a page and object to the copy we hold, write to support@critically.io.

You do not get to remove a note that disagrees with your page. There is no site-owner veto here and there will not be one, because a platform where publishers can delete the responses to what they published is not worth running.

What you get instead is a right of reply. Prove you control the domain and you can answer any citation of your pages. Your reply appears attached to the citation, marked as coming from your site, at the same weight. It does not remove, hide, collapse or downrank anything, and it does not stop anyone citing you again.

If something about your site is genuinely unlawful, the report form is open to you like anybody else. “The subject asked” is not, by itself, a reason for removal.

• Write about a private individual in a way that targets, exposes or endangers them. There are separate, stricter rules about writing about people, and they are enforced.
• Publish someone’s home address, phone number, workplace or other private details. Nor anything that could be construed as ‘doxxing’ or revealing private information.
• Post content that is unlawful where you are, or that sexualises a minor in any way.
• Impersonate a person or an organisation, including claiming a domain you do not control.
• Fabricate a source, forge a quotation, or knowingly cite a page as saying something it does not.
• Run automated accounts to manufacture citation, pin or review counts.
• Scrape the site at a scale that costs us money, or work around the limits on how often you can do things.
• Attack the service, or try to reach data that is not yours.

Being wrong is not on that list, and never will be. A badly argued note that is honestly sourced is exactly what this is for.

We may remove content or suspend an account that breaks these terms. For anything other than an emergency or a legal order we will tell you what was removed and why, and you can reply.

We keep a record of every removal decision and the reasoning behind it. Deciding that something should come down is a separate act from taking it down, and both are recorded.

Keep your sign-in details to yourself, and tell us at security@critically.io if you think somebody else has them. You can close your account at any time and export everything you wrote first.

Critically is provided as it is. We do not promise it will always be available, that the archive will capture every page, or that anything written here by anyone is true. Many publishers block automated readers, and we say so when it happens.

Nothing on this site is a finding of fact. Citation counts, pin counts and review counts measure attention and checking. They are not a truth score, and we will never publish one.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, for lost profits, or for what other people write here. Our total liability to you is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US$100 if that is more.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you posted or did here in breach of these terms, you agree to cover our reasonable costs in dealing with it. This does not apply to a claim that arises from our own decisions rather than yours.

If we change these terms materially we will say so and email you before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service afterwards means accepting the new version.

These terms are governed by the law of Florida. If any part is unenforceable, the rest still stands.

Questions: hi@critically.io.