The digital rhetorics of AIDS denialist networked publics

AIDS denialist publics congregate online, circulating discourses that dissent from mainstream health science, encouraging behaviors that cause unnecessary exposures and premature death. We offer “networked public analysis” as a means to leverage computational research methods to discover the texts that are important to networked publics. From a close reading of the core texts of an AIDS denialist networked public, we illustrate digital rhetorics characterized by empowering interactivity, offering control and stability to persons experiencing the existential suffering that can attend HIV+ diagnosis. We underscore the necessity of communication researchers, health care providers, scientists, and public health officials to consider the existential situations of AIDS denialist publics, which entangle denials of AIDS science with legitimate social anxieties.

Toward an Algorithmic Rhetoric

Insofar as algorithms are digital problem-solving operations that follow a set of rules or processes to arrive at a result, they are constrained by the rules that determine their parameters for operating. While an algorithm can only operate according to its instructions, however, the potential rules that might govern an algorithm are inexhaustible. An algorithm's design thus makes rhetorical choices that privilege the importance of some information or desired outcomes over others. This chapter argues for a way of thinking about algorithmic rhetoric as macro-, meso-, and micro-rhetorical. Along these lines, it would be beneficial to think more about algorithms as digital rhetorics with terrific power to sway what counts as knowledge, truth, and material reality in the everyday lives of people across an astonishing range of global communities in the twenty-first century.