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

Rachael Jordan

Journal of Business and Technical Communication2026https://doi.org/10.1177/10506519261433024article
ABDC C
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

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.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/10506519261433024

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{rachael2026,
  title        = {{Terms of Service and Community Guidelines as “Value-Laden” Documents: An (Adapted) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of “Sexual Content”}},
  author       = {Rachael Jordan},
  journal      = {Journal of Business and Technical Communication},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/10506519261433024},
}

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

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.