Are Facebook and Twitter copyrighted?

[bcnu]

Names of things like that are trademarks, not "copyrighted". No, you cannot use their trademarks, or anything similar, without their permission, if it is any way associated with social media. Their terms of service specifically prohibit that.

For instance, you might say "the birds twittered as the sun rose over the hills".

You can also use ANY trademarks in a reference form, such as "we tweeted our MySpace links to our Yahoo contacts and they Gmailed our Facebook posts back to Twitter." Not a single trademark infringement in that sentence.

However, "Logon to our Twitter feed and win prizes" would be completely illegal.