Designing for Discourse: Social Media, Socio-Technical Rhetorical Strategies, and Affirmative Action Discussions

Social media platforms enable diverse users to engage in everyday political talk with (un)known audiences. Platform features and affordances may shape political discussions and how audiences make sense of them, potentially shifting political attitudes. Using affirmative action (AA) – a controversial, identity-centric higher education policy – as a context for analysis, we investigate social media features’ and affordances’ role in AA discussions. Our qualitative content analysis of over 38,000 social media posts and comments across Reddit, Twitter/X, and TikTok demonstrates how features (e.g., Green Screen) and affordances (e.g., visibility) shape the presentation of external evidence and cues on social media that help users determine information veracity. We introduce socio-technical rhetorical strategies to describe rhetorical devices enabled by platform features and affordances and consider how these strategies are used to express and refute racism online. Finally, we suggest ways that social media designers may leverage visibility, navigability, and association affordances to enhance users’ ability to make sense of and safely experience AA discussions.