Rhetorical Analysis Of Thorn: Digital Defenders Of Children

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When an individual or a group speaks in favor of or recommends an action for a specific cause this is considered advocacy. An example of this would be when Ashton Kutcher, well known actor, spoke to congress to endorse new software on behalf of his company, Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children. Ashton Kutcher is the co-founder of the company Thorn; which focuses specifically on targeting the online portion of human trafficking as it is where the buying and selling of children mostly takes place. Thorn has produced software called Spotlight, which allows law enforcement to shift through data collected daily and prioritize cases that deal in the selling or buying of children. In Ashton Kutcher’s speech, he explains that the use of children in human and sex trafficking has been increasing while the …show more content…

For Ashton Kutchers speech he used the ethical view point of normative ethics, he believes it is our moral duty to help save these children. Kutcher uses the phrase that we have “the right to pursue happiness” and then he states that these children’s “right to pursue happiness is stripped from them, taken by force, raped, abused”; a very powerful statement that also puts in prospective what the children are put through. When talking about rhetoric, Aristotle says there are three elements: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is the appeal to ethics and credibility, Pathos is an appeal to emotion, and Logos is the appeal to logic; in Kutcher’s speech he encompasses all three. Kutcher is able to establish his credibility to advocate for the abolishment of human trafficking by being a co-founder and chairmen of the organization Thorn, creating software to bring it down. Kutcher and his team also have worked with the FBI and The Department of Homeland Security to try and infiltrate the human trafficking organization. As Kutcher goes on with his speech he establishes

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