iTrust: Building Trustworthy Social Media for Healthy Public Discourse

The iTrust workshop brings together researchers, civil society actors, media practitioners, and policy experts to share insights at the intersection of computational argumentation, digital communication, and democratic governance.

Over three days in Lugano, participants will explore the project's key findings on argumentation, ethos, emotional appeals, and framing strategies in social media, discuss AI-driven tools for diagnosing problematic discourse, and reflect together on the challenges and opportunities facing digital environments.

You can register to the keynote sessions as well as for the whole event by clicking here.

24 June 17:00 - 18:00 Machines that Read Between the Lines

Keynote speaker: Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven

The talk introduces the concept of language comprehension, emphasizing the necessity of uncovering both implicit social and physical meanings embedded in linguistic expressions. We then review the current state of the art in methodologies —particularly neural network–based approaches— aimed at revealing latent social and physical meanings, highlighting key advances as well as persistent challenges and limitations in existing approaches. 

24 June 13:15 - 14:00 Polarization, Trust and Digital Society

Keynote speaker: Katarzyna Budzyńska, Warsaw University of Technology

25 June 09:00 - 10:00 Cybersecurity, Democracy and Public Institutions in the Digital Age

Keynote speaker: Luca Tagliaretti, Executive Director of the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre

It will be followed by a roundtable discussion with Antonio Carzaniga, Università della Svizzera italiana.

26 June 12:00 - 13:00 Arguing Technology: AI as a Puzzle of Communication for Argumentation

Keynote speaker: Mark Aakhus, Rutgers University 

In argumentation theory, the role of information and communication technologies has typically been treated as a medium for human communication and argumentation between people. This orientation is problematic as these technologies increasingly become participants in argumentative communication. Argumentation theory can no longer be satisfied with its conventional concern for communication's surface of vernacular argument. 
Technical system development is rapidly appropriating ordinary language as the critical interface, and thus disturbing the doxa of design for communication and compelling heterodox engagement about communication's prospects. Indeed, argumentation theory must contend with AI as a puzzle of communication for argumentation. 
How to engage it as a communicative participant and how to engage the infrastructural and institutional design for its communicative participation is a curious conundrum with arguing technology. Exploring the polylogical underpinnings of arguing technology is a way forward. This requires going further than the quantitative insight about many positions, players, and places in argumentation to the design insight that "poly" refers to the combining form that blends these elements together as an argumentative polylogue. What follows is recognizing how the actions that, in many guises, callout and problematize built environments of positions, infrastructures, and institutions, generate and organize complex spaces of disagreement into systemic interdependencies of positions, players, and places constitutive of particular trajectories and qualities of communicative interaction and its rationality. Some cases of arguing technology will be considered to develop this broad claim about argumentation.