Ad Hominem Attacks, and Political Image Construction on Czech Disinformation Websites_preprint

This study examines the gender dimension of ad hominem attacks as a component of confrontational argumentative style of creators of Czech disinformation websites. Drawing on pragma-dialectical theory, specifically van Eemeren’s (2019, 2021) concept of argumentative style and Peng’s (2021) framework of compromising and uncompromising confrontational styles — we analyse 1,483 ad hominem attacks directed at five female and five male politicians on three major Czech disinformation websites. We demonstrate that gendered ad hominem attacks constitute a systematic topical choice within disinformers’ confrontational repertoire — serving the compromising style when shifting readers’ epistemic positions, and the uncompromising style when silencing political opponents. Thematic analysis of the dataset yields 42 topics across seven general categories. The study further introduces ad masculum as a theoretically underexplored gendered variant of abusive ad hominem and documents a marked asymmetry between ad feminam and ad masculum attacks in frequency, thematic diversity, and delegitimising function. The findings extend pragma-dialectical theory to the empirical analysis of disinformation discourse.