The article investigates the factors influencing the formation of rhetorical norms in social media. The case discussed concerns the activity of politicians in an election campaign. The author argues that, in addition to existing norms resulting from law, practice and the situation on the political scene, new conditions of online communication must be taken into account – the significance of technology and the change in the citizen’s position as a participant in the interaction.

The concept of privacy in relation to public figures is linked to the development and ubiquity of mass media. In times before photojournalists, paparazzi and social media, the private and public spheres functioned separately, with no insight provided into various aspects of users' lives. In the age of mediated reality, skilful management of the boundary between the private and the public can be an effective persuasive tool in the realm of ethos. Furthermore, persuasive objectives are evolving, as are the rhetorical principles that govern the development of ethos. In this article, I analyse how leading global politicians use the concept of privacy in public communication. The discussion focuses on types of private information disclosed, the effectiveness of such communication strategies and their impact on achieving persuasive goals, particularly the effective shaping of a positive public image.

This article explores how Peter Santenello’s Border Series, viewed more than ninety million times on YouTube, depicts U.S. migration in the early 2020s. After years abroad as a travel vlogger, Santenello returned to the United States determined to show the country from the ground up, arguing that mainstream outlets overlook crucial realities. His Border Series is part of this turn. Through close readings of selected episodes, the paper identifies three recurring rhetorical patterns in his coverage of migration to the U.S. First, Santenello’s hand-held camera gains entry to police trucks, farm fields, hotels, and desert contacts to the mainstream representations which are considered to be politically biased. Second, each video functions as a “third space” where roles remain fluid: migrants appear as commodities or humanitarian cases, sheriffs shift from protectors to reluctant aid workers, and viewers assign these labels through real-time debate. Third, Santenello’s civic-traveler style combines storytelling with witnessing; by rejecting the journalist label yet featuring multiple viewpoints, he widens the circle of voices that narrate the border and resists classical media framing. Taken together, these patterns show that digital, personality-driven reporting is remapping migration discourse, turning contested ground into a shared arena for seeing and arguing.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric concerning migrants in Polish social media based on the category of topos, as in Discourse-Historical Approach, in order to evaluate the threats and dangers generated rhetorically. The research material comprises a corpus of far-right anti-Ukrainian comments and posts collected from Facebook and Instagram profiles. Based on quantitative insights into the corpus, the paper conducts a qualitative study to classify the topoi and highlight specific rhetorical strategies employed by the far-right toward Ukrainian migrants. The analysis shows the patterns which the users of extreme discourses employ to verbalize and rationalize their disdain for the migrants. These present the Ukrainian migrants as a threat to Polish independence and social order, argue that the support they receive is undeserved, and present ruling politicians as inept and ignorant of the needs of Poles.

This article aims to explore how psychologist Aleksandra Sileńska, known online as Mom Therapist, addresses the mental health of mothers in her Facebook posts. Through content analysis and rhetorical tools, including the categories of topos and the triad of ethos, pathos, and logos, the study examines Sileńska’s communication strategies. The findings reveal that she predominantly employs pathos and ethos in her posts. Additionally, her promotion of the Cared-for Mom model contrasts sharply with the traditional Polish Mother topos, which often overlooks the mental health of mothers.

This article explores the adaptation of Gérard Genette's concept of narrative prolepsis in the realm of social media as the proleptic technique, demonstrating its effectiveness as a tool for anticipatory rhetoric in digital communication. By analysing selected instances from Twitter and Facebook, the study illustrates how digital utterances employ proleptic cues to capture audience attention and potentially engage audiences. The concept of prolepsis, traditionally associated with narrative foresight in literature, is shown to be effectively transposed into the digital context, where it functions as a mechanism to attract user attention. This adaptation highlights the dynamism of rhetorical strategies in the evolving landscape of digital communication, underscoring the continuity of classical rhetorical principles in new media environments. Future research should incorporate a corpus study, which would allow for an in-depth examination of the diverse array of proleptic cues employed by social media influencers. Furthermore, an exploration into the persuasive efficacy of prolepsis, along with its potential links to reasoning fallacies, could provide intriguing insights. Additionally, an analysis of audience reactions to these cues could contribute to a more holistic understanding of their impact.

Amidst the European migrant crisis, a provocative advertisement campaign by the far-right party the Sweden Democrats was destroyed by a mob. No other campaign in Sweden had attracted a similar amount of attention and resentment. This qualitative case study analyses the activism rhetoric that caused the ‘Twitterstorm’ of the decade. Through a fantasy theme analysis, it determines how the protesters defended their anti-racist rhetorical vision. Action themes connected to fantasy types and symbolic cues provoked the Twittersphere, leading activists to destroy the campaign, transcending the virtual for the physical. This event is a paradigm case for rhetorical-political social media activism and gives insight into how the SD’s provocative rhetoric functions.

W artykule dokonano analizy postów Mariusza Szczygła na serwisie Instagram w odniesieniu do cech dyskursu retorycznego. Wykorzystano w tym celu m.in. triadę retorycznych dowodów przekonywania, tj. etos, logos, patos. Charakterystyce poddano sposób prowadzenia konta w nawiązaniu do zmieniającego się środowiska pracy pisarzy/dziennikarzy. Zwrócono uwagę na rolę obrazu w kształtowaniu skutecznego przekazu i transmisji argumentacji. Analiza pokazała, że instadziennik wyraża ciekawość Szczygła wobec świata. Jest też sposobem na uporządkowanie jego własnych rozterek i dylematów. Interakcja z czytelnikami, promocja licznych inicjatyw i projektów związanych z profesją oraz możliwość podzielenia się pasjami i przemyśleniami dotyczącymi różnych sfer życia są spoiwem jego wizerunku, opartego na perswazyjności przekazu.

This pair of complementary books, Debasing Political Rhetoric: Dissing Opponents, Journalists, and Minorities in Populist Leadership Communication together with Political Debasement: Incivility, Contempt, and Humiliation in Parliamentary and Public Discourse, charts a comprehensive and highly informative review of such subjects as impoliteness, incivility and political debasement in the contemporary democracies consistently remaining under the threat of opportunistic strongmen.While the former collection concentrates on statements of specific national leaders in the public realm (even taking into consideration the politicians' informal activities when these statements are voiced), the latter is devoted to analyzing the language of selected political leaders, such as Donald Trump (USA), the recently re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, together with the former presidents Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).The latter volume also covers political discourses of parliamentary exchanges, including Spanish politicians' adversity in the parliamentary as well as social media setting resulting in an increased level of incivility (Chapter 2).Chapter 4 traces incivility in the case of British politicians, with a special emphasis on a sample of five (deputy) Prime Ministers addressing the parliament.The focus of Chapter 5 is how irony, ridicule and politeness (or lack thereof) are recruited as frequent rhetorical tools by Japanese politicians sarcastically addressing specific social groups.In Chapter 6, the study interrogates the manners in which the derogatory language of Chinese leaders has changed after Mao Zedong.The contributions also include Hindu political context (Chapter 7) showing the extent to which Indian culture supplements the literal denotations of class, origin and gender, thus influencing the overall level of political debasement.In Chapter 8 the analysis

Przedmiotem artykułu jest opis wybranych inwektyw służących dyskredytacji przeciwnika (głównie rządu i ministra zdrowia), jakimi na portalu społecznościowym Facebook posługują się osoby sceptyczne wobec szczepień. W omawianym dyskursie obserwujemy zróżnicowane środki językowe służące deprecjacji, wśród nich szczególne miejsce zajmują te, które odwołują się do wątków antysemickich i wojennych. Materiał analityczny stanowi korpus tekstów zawierających komentarze użytkowników Facebooka. Badania koncentrują się na analizie sposobów negatywnego wartościowania (deprecjonowania) przeciwnika i pokazują wykorzystywane w tym celu środki językowe. Wśród nich można wymienić m.in. określenia: jude Niedziel, zbrodniarze, dr Mengele vel Niedzielski, covidowe hitlerki, ludobójstwo.

Populism can be treated as an ideological attribute of political parties, but in this study, it is operationalized as a feature of argumentation that allows populists to claim to be the only ones to represent the interests of the nation. Such anti-pluralist arguments could be observed during US midterm elections in 2018 in online discourses of the right-wing political movement Tea Party. This article reports on a mixed-method study of the Tea Party’s official website obtained through scraping the All News feed. The quantitative linguistic analysis of keywords, concordances and couplings in the newsfeed sample is complemented with a qualitative rhetorical analysis of some topoi and argumentative fallacies. The analyses reveal such strategies as: (1) homogenizing the representation of true patriots, (2) polarizing between “good us” and “evil them,” (3) discrediting opponents through analogies, “worst” examples and ad hominem attacks (4) conspiracy theorizing, and (5) mobilizing modes of pathos and ethos in relation to mediatized and historicized cultural imaginaries. The study showcases the advantages of a mixed-method approach to the so-called populist rhetoric.

The aim of this article is to provide an analytical introduction upon the ways of representation of transgender minority in new media. Through rhetorical analysis of selected content related to two high-profile transgender YouTubers, we identified five building blocks of given discourse: reduction of a structural problem to a personal one, reduction of a person’s reality to feelings, tokenization, psychiatrization of transgender identity, and ingroup gatekeeping.

Instagram is the fastest rising social medium used by young people in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and therefore constitutes a superb means for companies to advertise their brands. To better inform the selection of the most well-targeted and effective models for advertising products, this research first analyzed UAE-based Instagram posts to explore the types of models used for different types of advertising content on Instagram. Individual interviews were then conducted with Emirati women consumers to determine the criteria they use when reviewing Instagram models in terms of the intention to purchase. Results reveal that there are three archetypal models connected with product ranges relating to (1) beauty, (2) health, and (3) fashion. Four determining factors in purchase decisions emerged, namely, (1) product effect, (2) product display, (3) the modesty of the models, and (4) the pose of the models. These last two, and most notably, the modesty of the model, is perhaps somewhat uniquely relevant to the region given the primacy of female modesty within the Islamic canon. Moreover, the majority of women interviewed stressed that they favor models who exemplify a realistic lifestyle and authentic beauty. While the goal of effortless perfection is a common one, this objective may be more dominant in this socio-cultural region, given the Islamic prescriptions on female modesty. Such a desire for an effortless perfection and authentic deception characterizes the essence of the ethos paradox of Instagram models. The value of this empirical investigation is that it highlights a potential pitfall for advertisers in making the assumption that featuring strong influencers in their advertising is necessarily an enhancement of sales potential. Moreover, it illustrates how Instagram endorsement functions in this geopolitical context and offers guidelines for optimizing Instagram advertising.

The standards and practices in journalism that best serve democratic deliberation remain a matter of intense scrutiny in the digital age. The United States has a long history of journalists exposing self-interested behaviors of political or corporate elites with investigative journalism. With online media, journalistic practices encompass fact-checking against a variety of sources, and countering the claims of other journalists from competing outlets. This article aims at delimiting the rhetorical properties of an emerging genre of YouTube counter-journalism. The study reports on a rhetorical and eristic analysis of the main patterns of countering in a sample of videos posted on YouTube on the subject of the US presidential campaign in spring 2020. The analysis reveals some ways in which YouTube journalists break down the dominant media narratives and present counterclaims and critiques, which is usually accompanied by fact-checking, showcasing evidence and providing alternative explanations or counterarguments. However, counter-journalism is not free from eristic devices that may misrepresent political issues for the subscribers.

Autor omawia zjawisko grzeczności jako strategii komunikacyjnej stosowanej w social sellingu przez podmioty zainteresowane korzystaniem z portali społecznościowych w celu docierania do jak najszerszego grona potencjalnych klientów. Materiał badawczy stanowią posty opublikowane przez Ewę Chodakowską na portalu Instagram na przełomie 2019 i 2020 roku. Analiza łączy narzędzia tradycyjnej retoryki z badaniami językowymi strategii marketingowych w mediach społecznościowych.

A highly visual social media platform such as Instagram is incorporated by many companies in their marketing communications strategies to advertise their products and services employing digital visual rhetoric. The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of visual framing strategies, sentiment, and product presentation modality in the multicultural context by examining social media practices of influencers belonging to two cultural backgrounds, namely the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Arab Emirates. Using content analysis, this study reveals visual rhetorical strategies practiced by Instagram influencers that can equip digital marketing practitioners with effective devices of persuasion. The study provides a useful contribution to the theory of digital visual rhetoric.

Web 2.0’s progressive use of personalizing algorithms has dangerously situated users into filter bubbles, or digital habitus. This insulated nature leaves users with an inability to engage civilly with others during online dialogues. This work examines how users on the sites Facebook and Countable frame and address online audiences, paying attention to the correlation between civility and action beyond the online dialogue. Through careful analyses on the respective comment threads, this work finds that the coupling of fewer personalizing algorithms and the inclusion of an established action beyond the dialogue can better ensure civility online.

This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of the structure and selected contents of Amnesty International’s official website. The study is empirical in nature and considers current patterns of textual resources and visual affordances together with color applications and compositional design. It analyzes a sample of news reports, AI mission statement, vision and values together with topical icons, infographics, photographic and video materials. It illustrates the salient multimodal solutions in persuasive communication and evaluates the organization’s online rhetoric with respect to the persuasive potential to mobilize support and remediate its appeals in social media. It also applies the notion of newsworthiness to demonstrate how reports, visuals and posts are represented to arouse emotions (pathos), engender authenticity and appropriateness of actions (logos) and boost credibility (ethos).

The paper claims that in the online discussions on Facebook concerning veganism – a brand new social food habit in Western societies – one can observe the mixture of traditional moral and revolutionary arguments. The presence of almost-religious extremism impacts a veganism-related verbal and visual argumentation, and even violence against the vegans. From the technical point of view, in the discussions concerning the veganism the probability argument, the argument of going-beyond and the ad sacrificium argument prevail.