Keynote speakers

Dr. Katarzyna Budzynska, Associate Professor, Faculty of Administration and Social Science at the Warsaw University of Technology, https://newethos.org/budzynska/

Ethos in the Digital Society: A Computational Approach

One of the major threats associated with digitalisation – which manifests itself in online misbehaviour such as hate speech, fake news, echo chambers, cyber tribalism, and so on – is a violation of the basic condition for trusting and being trustworthy. Thus, when we calibrate our focus on this critical requirement for constructive, reasonable, and responsible interactions in the digital society, then ethos, that is, ethotic (mis)behaviour, becomes central for the study of communication. In this talk, I present a new research program, called The New Ethos, which employs AI-based technology to investigate rhetoric at scale, that is, distributed and digitised communication networks in which volume of information and velocity of message proliferation take on a hitherto unknown scale. We develop Rhetoric Analytics, a suit of computational tools that calculate and visualise statistical patterns, trends and tendencies in rhetorical use of language. It allows us to explore, for example, how social media users react to rhetorical strategies of Donald Trump in the presidential elections or how people argue about COVID-19 vaccines on Reddit. This opens the path to comprehend the present and the future of social communication and human condition. By unifying philosophy, linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, this goal becomes closer than ever before.

Dr. Henrike Jansen, Associate Professor at the Centre for Linguistics, University of Leiden, https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/henrike-jansen#tab-1

Populists’ responses to commotion about their words: A case study from Dutch politics

A significant portion of today’s public discourse revolves around criticizing others’ statements for being unacceptable. Social media have made it remarkably easy to demand accountability – especially from public figures – when words are seen as offensive, threatening, misleading, or otherwise problematic. In turn, the accused individual is put in a position to restore their reputation and thus to find a way to explain their contested remarks in a manner that removes or diminishes culpability.
This keynote focuses on populist politicians whose words have caused commotion. It aims to uncover how these politicians defend themselves against accusations of making a controversial remark. One might expect them to be reluctant to distance themselves from their contested words, since those words usually resonate strongly with the populists’ core supporters. However, like all politicians, populists seek to appeal to the largest possible group of voters, and this pressures them to align, at least to some extent, with general norms of reasonableness. The presentation will identify some typical defense strategies employed by these politicians and propose criteria for evaluating their reasonableness.
The analysis draws on Dutch political discourse, and the identified defense strategies are categorized according to the framework outlined in Boogaart, Jansen, and van Leeuwen (2021; 2022; 2024).

Prof. Jean Wagemans, professor of Cognition, Communication, and Argumentation at the University of Amsterdam, https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/w/a/j.h.m.wagemans/j.h.m.wagemans.html#About

The Role of Rhetoric in Defending Against Weapons of Mass Persuasion

We live in the Information Age, where digital technologies shape our individual, social, and political realities. A central challenge of this era is ‘misinformation’, an umbrella term that includes fake news, echo chambers, polarization, conspiracy theories, and troll factories. The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) has further intensified these concerns. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT reflect both Gorgias’ description of rhetoric and Plato’s criticism of it: they function like digital sophists, capable of generating persuasive texts on any topic and for any target audience at the push of a button, without any built-in guarantee of truth. They also enable large-scale rhetorical manipulation, mobilizing automated troll armies to sway public opinion.
Is there anything we can do against these ‘weapons of mass persuasion’? And what is left of rhetoric, the art of crafting persuasive texts, now that these can be mass-produced by machines?
This keynote examines the shifting role of rhetoric in the face of these transformations. Rather than fading into obsolescence, I argue that rhetoric must evolve from a productive art into a critical one, arming individuals with the skills to analyze and resist manipulative discourse. In particular, I discuss the method of “rhetoric-checking” as a vital complement to fact-checking: while fact-checking verifies the accuracy of claims, rhetoric-checking assesses argumentation quality, emotional appeals, and deceptive persuasion tactics. In an era where persuasive language is both ubiquitous and machine-generated, democratic discourse hinges not only on crafting strong arguments but also on cultivating the ability to criticize them. By repositioning rhetoric as a safeguard against misinformation, we can preserve its role as a cornerstone of intellectual resilience in the digital age.