Patterns of Responses to Abusive Ad Hominem Attacks: The Case of Facebook News-commenting

Abstract

News-commenting in social media is a platform that offers an opportunity for online deliberation through argumentative discussion. Yet aggressive exchanges between commenters with clashing ideologies have become a prominent feature of online news-commenting. One example of the aggressive exchanges is the use of direct personal attacks among news-commenters, namely abusive ad hominem. In this paper, I aim to reveal the patterns of responses given to abusive ad hominem attacks by studying the comments to news items in Facebook. The reason is to shed light on how the discussion evolves after the ad hominem attack. The patterns that this paper illustrates are a summary of studying the responses to 20 ad hominem attacks that figure in the comments to news items topicalizing various social problems in Turkey. The examples were drawn from those that topicalise ‘violence against women in Turkey’. Three patterns were identified: (1) abusive ad hominem as a response to an abusive ad hominem attack; (2) refusing to carry on the discussion; and (3) critically evaluating the abusive ad hominem attack. These patterns show that the pragma-dialectical definition of the ad hominem fallacy proves to be functional in understanding its role in blocking the way to the resolution.

Keywords

• abusive ad hominem
• responses
• pragma-dialectics
• facebook news-commenting
• adam karalama safsatası
• yanıtlar
• edimsel-eytişimsel yaklaşım
• facebook haber yorumları