Terms of Service
These are the terms you agree to by using Somali Update: what you may do with our reporting, what we will and will not answer for, and what happens if somebody starts pulling the archive down a wire at three in the morning. Reading the site means accepting them. Last updated: August 2026.
Most of the substance is ordinary. One section is not, and it is the one about machines.
Who may use the site
Reading is open to anyone, free, with no account required. To comment or take the newsletter you must be old enough to agree to terms where you live, usually 16 or 18, and the address you give us has to be yours. Our privacy policy explains what happens to it.
You are responsible for what happens under your account. Do not try to break, overload, probe or reroute our systems, or use the site to distribute malware. A large share of our readers are on mobile data they pay for by the megabyte, which is why our pages are light.
Our work belongs to us
Everything original here is protected by copyright: the reporting, the headlines, the photographs and video we commission, the graphics and maps, the newsletters, and the arrangement of the site. Some material appears under licence from other rights holders and stays theirs.
What you get is a licence to read. Personal, non-commercial use, on any device. Print it, save it, quote it with attribution and a link, share the link anywhere. What you may not do is treat the archive as raw material for a product of your own. Our copyright policy covers how to ask permission.
Scraping, and using our reporting to train a model
A story on this site costs something specific. An afternoon of calls to a district official who does not want to talk. A stringer standing in a place where being there is a risk. Two editors arguing over whether a casualty figure has one source or two, and a decision to wait when waiting costs the day’s traffic. The output is a page of text a crawler swallows in a hundredth of a second.
So the rule is this. You may not scrape, crawl at volume, mirror, cache beyond ordinary browser and search-engine caching, or systematically download any part of this site. You may not use our content as training data, fine-tuning data, retrieval material or grounding material for a machine learning model or any generative system, without our written permission. We expressly reserve all rights, including text and data mining rights available to us under copyright law. The directives in our robots file are part of these terms rather than a suggestion, and ignoring them while calling the result fair use does not make it fair use.
We are not romantic about this. Search engines that send readers back are welcome. What we object to is a system that ingests a year of reporting from the Horn, answers the question in a box and pays for none of it. A second problem is particular to our beat: a model repeating our security reporting without the caveats and the date turns a hedged claim into a flat assertion about who controls a district, and the person carrying that risk is not the model. To license the archive, including for training, write to support@somaliupdate.com.
Also out of bounds: republishing whole articles, translating them without permission, framing our pages so they read as yours, and putting our name on something we did not write. A fabricated casualty figure travelling under our masthead is a safety problem for the people who report for us, and we will pursue it.
Comments and anything else you send us
Comments are open on some articles and are moderated. What gets removed is not mysterious: personal abuse, threats, material that identifies or endangers someone, incitement against a clan or a community, unverified claims of responsibility, casualty numbers asserted as fact, and impersonation of an official. On a beat where a comment can get somebody hurt we would rather over-moderate.
When you post a comment or send material for publication you keep ownership and give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish, store, edit for length and clarity, and archive it. By sending it you are telling us it is yours to send and that it is not defamatory. Tips are handled as our contact page describes, and sending us something does not oblige us to publish it. We will not confirm to a third party that you sent it.
Links, embeds and other people’s content
We link out constantly, because sourcing a reader can follow is part of the job. A link is not an endorsement of the site at the other end, and we have no control over what it becomes later. Embedded posts and documents are served by the platform that hosts them, under its own terms and tracking.
Advertising works the same way. An ad here is not a recommendation, advertisers answer for their own claims, and the categories we refuse are listed on our advertising page. If content on our pages is illegal or dangerous, tell us and we will act.
What we do not promise
The site is provided as it is. We check what we publish, but we do not warrant that the site will be available without interruption, that it will be free of error, or that any story is complete, and we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement as far as the law allows.
Reporting on a fast-moving situation is accurate as at publication and can be overtaken within the hour. Our disclaimer covers what that means, and our editorial standards describe the checking a story goes through first.
Liability, and suspension
To the fullest extent the law permits, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for any decision you take on the basis of something you read here. Where liability cannot be excluded it is limited to what you have paid us for access, which is nothing. We do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you breach these terms and that produces a claim against us, you agree to cover the reasonable costs. That clause is aimed at bulk scrapers, not at a reader who left a sharp comment.
We can block an account, an IP range or an automated client that breaches these terms. Where a person rather than a script is involved we normally warn first, because most bad comments are a bad day rather than a campaign. You can stop whenever you like and unsubscribe with one click. The sections on copyright, the licence you give us, liability and governing law survive after you go.
Which law applies, disputes, and changes
These terms are governed by the laws applicable at the publisher’s place of business, and any dispute goes to the courts with jurisdiction there. We do not name that jurisdiction in a public document, for the same reason we publish no street address: several of the people who report for us live where being findable is a hazard, as our about page explains. A lawyer needing to serve formal process should write to support@somaliupdate.com for a route for service.
Before anyone reaches a court we would rather hear from you. Almost every complaint here is about accuracy, and those settle faster through our corrections process than through a letter from a firm. If a court finds one clause unenforceable, the rest stands.
We update this page when the terms change and change the date at the top. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the new version. A material change gets a notice on the site.
