digital platform designers

Abstract: Religiously branded platforms raise important questions about trust, usability, and autonomy when technology is built around a specific faith. Prior HCI work on Islam and Muslim technology has focused on single-purpose tools such as prayer, scripture, and health apps, leaving infrastructures like browsers, which shape a user's relationship with the Internet, unexamined. We address this gap through semi-structured interviews with 16 users of Kahf Browser, a faith-aligned browser designed to support Muslims' online activities. Findings show religious identity motivates adoption but does not sustain it. Trust is not fixed by religious branding but shifts over time based on the browser's functionality, and users take pride in Muslim-built infrastructure. Building on these insights, we introduce porous digital segregation: a model where users seek not a sealed alternative internet but a protected default with selective exit mechanisms. We conclude by connecting findings to broader issues in faith-aligned technology and offering design recommendations.

Abstract: Algorithmic outputs now populate the digital environments through which contemporary life is organized. The role of law in facilitating and constituting (rather than merely responding to) these processes is gaining increasing traction across scholarly accounts. This inquiry traces the evolution of algorithmic outputs attending to their legal underpinnings and social implications, surfacing the mutations of machine speech. The first mutation redefined speech as data to be queried: search engines transformed the web from a space of information retrieval into an economic regime of algorithmic visibility. The second mutation reframed speech as engagement: social media platforms fused moderation with amplification, turning expression into a metric of attention, governed by corporate architectures. The third mutation emerges in conversational systems and interfaces, where generative text displaces information retrieval, bringing with it dense technolegal entanglements and profound epistemic consequences. Scholars of freedom of expression, informational privacy, and communication studies have long grappled with these dynamics, yet their implications for broader legal thought have also become urgent. This piece seeks to organize and clarify the evolving debate around algorithmic speech, making this critical but often fragmented discourse more accessible to wider legal and interdisciplinary audiences. In doing so, it bridges the gap between observing technological transformation and critically assessing the constitutive role of law within it, offering a conceptual resource for researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners navigating and contesting this evolving landscape.