Journal of Business and Technical Communication Mar 2026

Terms of Service and Community Guidelines as “Value-Laden” Documents: An (Adapted) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of “Sexual Content”

Rachael Jordan University of South Carolina

Abstract

Technical and professional communicators need to continue to interrogate how the seemingly mundane documents they create, such as terms of service (ToS) and community guidelines, and the systems those documents become a part of can oppress, exclude, and affect marginalized and hypermarginalized communities. This article presents an adapted corpus-assisted discourse analysis of how “sexual content” is defined across a corpus of 176 ToS and community guidelines from 118 social media sites. The findings show how ToS and community guidelines can work together to complicate our understanding of how values are intentionally and unintentionally embedded in these documents in order to uphold power or to meet emancipatory ends.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
2026-03-19
DOI
10.1177/10506519261433024
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Topics
discourse analysis social media affect and writing
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