#ATributetoPoliticians: A Guide to Saving Face with Political Communication on Social Media after an Online Shaming

This study focuses on the issues behind saving face in political forums on social media after an online shaming. The project utilized content analysis to examine the miscommunication points between social media users and President Trump on Twitter during the week-long aftermath of the Charlottesville protests in August of 2017. While tweets by both social media users and President Trump were analyzed, words in constituent tweets were categorized as either satisfaction or resentment in addition to words in President Trump’s tweets being categorized as either ambiguity or transparency. An “other” category was allotted for ambiguous constituent tweets, transparent reportive tweets, bipartisan reportive tweets, and neutral tweets. Results indicated that the common miscommunication points were the lack of transparency, an imbalance between simple and complex rhetoric, and the failure to clearly identify stakeholders. Once these miscommunication points were identified, face-saving methods were suggested as follows: responding with transparency, finding a balance between simple and complex rhetoric, holding oneself accountable in identifying stakeholders, and referring directly to audience members as important role players in one’s campaign. The paper upon which this poster is based was written for the Senior Seminar course in Communication Arts. The paper was competitively selected for presentation at the Northwest Communication Association Conference in April 2018