"Not only are platforms rhetorical in the sense that they occupy a public imaginary that is discursively constructed via carefully crafted branding efforts, but they are also rhetorical in that their decisions produce effects in the world."
"The tension between open authorship/open participation and the legal, cultural, and technological systems that shape them is ongoing today and will no doubt continue as we further blur the lines between physical life and online life."
"Researchers must be mindful of the identities they create on social media, being sure to consider the ethics of these platforms as both user and researcher. Social media platforms are powerful research tools, but they are above all rhetorical, and therefore deserve our continued methodological attention."
"Grindr has the potentiality of being such a market-mediated counterpublic, where queers can meet in virtual space, encountering difference and developing new intimacies with each other, ones that play out both through the app and in physical space."
"In the end, GamerGate activism resembles a churn of constant invention, moving from one celebrity to another, whether as friend or foe . Rather than possessing a single, authoritative argument, GamerGate welcomed whatever argument caught fire."
"Yik Yak was simply too open, too democratic, too anonymous, and too ephemeral to survive in the monetization-driven world of social media platforms today. Unlike Snapchat, which we use as counterpoint in this article, Yik Yak appears to have been incompatible at the structural level with what we call corporate kairos."
"Algorithms function as information brokers that manage, control, and direct the content that platform users can search and access; in doing so, they exert rhetorical influence by determining what information matters and is available to researchers, and by providing that information across the many interfaces of the platform."
"Reddit is like a tiny internet: a place full of memes that are often offensive and hilarious at once. A place for activism and knowledge-sharing, shitposting and trolling. A place where mob mentality and anonymity more often lead to abuse campaigns and conspiracy theories than not."
"Weapons of Math Destruction expands our methods and pedagogies for critically engaging with digital platforms and algorithms. The book enables, and urges us, to engage new sites, civic institutions, and new issues, the effects of algorithms on institutions, those served by the institutions, and our democracy which is enabled by those institutions."