ECA 2025 — 5th European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2025): Argumentation in the Digital Society

The special theme of this conference is Argumentation in the Digital Society. The main objective of the conference is to identify the key research areas related to the dynamics of change and development in today’s digitised society. Social media bring with them many new communication opportunities and open up a range of exciting challenges related to new forms of argumentation with unprecedented reach and associated social impact. They may also generate phenomena that can negatively affect the rationality and the reasonableness of argumentative discourse. Particularly noteworthy among these is the phenomenon of polarisation, which is of considerable importance for the distancing of social groups (including social media user communities) from each other, as well as phenomena such as the spread of fake news, offensive language, and hate speech. These and other phenomena in digitised communication may constitute a block to the development of rational and reasonable activity in argumentative discourse. Hence there is a need to develop the theoretical tools of argumentation and related disciplines that allow discussion and argument to be founded on trust, charity, and goodwill. The conference aims to explore these topics and ensure a high-quality exchange of research results.