A Comparative Analysis of Website Affordances on Political Discourse

<span style="font-weight: 400;">This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore how types of rhetoric are shaped by social media systems. We define two key terms: website architecture and website affordances. Website Architecture refers to the literal composition of digital formats. Website affordances refer to the social meanings of digital tools within those structures. Previous literature finds that user behavior varies between different Website Architectures, and that attention-based algorithms shape online identity construction and, in macrocosm, online communities. Studies also find that moral-emotional rhetoric is highly effective across social media websites and indicates or incentivizes real-world violence. I posit that online rhetoric serves as a means to delineate ideological boundaries, particularly when certain user behaviors are impeded by Website affordances. I adapt Jennifer Forestal&rsquo;s model of digital democracy to qualitatively assess a user&rsquo;s website affordances on Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter). I further categorize a series of posts across five political controversies between December 2024 and January 2025 (n = 493) based on an adaptation of Ruth Wodak&rsquo;s Discourse-Historical Approach. I find that there are significant differences in the presence or absence of particular rhetorical strategies between social media websites, and that the effectiveness of these rhetorical strategies varies between platforms and does not correlate with incentives for online engagement. Websites with architecture to create well-defined and bounded communities exhibit rhetoric and attention on par with mainstream news outlets. Websites that rely on refreshing content feeds, less bounded community moderation, or have inflexible posting affordances exhibit higher rates of Intensifying and Argumentative rhetoric.</span>