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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 pragmadialectical definition of the ad hominem fallacy proves to be functional in understanding its role in blocking the way to the resolution.

It is an essential requirement of democracy that politicians provide account of their words and actions to the public. However, being able to account is especially important when a politician or the party he/she is representing is assumed responsible for a critical event that has undesirable consequences for the public. Under such a condition, political press conferences serve as an instrument for a politician to justify the position of the government by means of argumentation. By adopting the pragma-dialectical framework, this paper sets out to explain how a politician maneuvers strategically in a press conference for the purpose of diminishing political responsibility when his party which is in charge of the government is assumed responsible for a critical event. The paper draws its data from the political press conference held by Erdoğan, a former Prime Minister of Turkey, following the mine accident that took place in Soma, Turkey, in 2014.

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