Abstract In this essay, I explore what Gray (2015) calls “the excesses of representation” that reproduce race and gender across proliferating digital platforms. I traverse the digital in tracking and tracing viral inequality, data surveillance, and moderation. Does the term “social media,” as a redundant term, accurately describe the processes of algorithmic amplification by which representational excesses get diffused and made legible? That is to say, do “social media” constitute formative spaces that produce social affect, or do they constitute…