Trust-oriented Argumentation in Rhetorical Sub-Arenas: from Corporate Communication to Online Stakeholder Discussions. The "The Facts About Facebook" case.

This paper lays the foundations for a research project aimed at analysing trust-oriented argumentation in crisis communication in online contexts. While the argumentative dimension of trust-oriented strategies is fundamentally neglected in existing crisis management and communication research, the analysis of the argumentative configuration underlying trust-related standpoints is left unexplored also in argumentation studies. We propose a systematic methodology for the reconstruction of the argumentative and rhetorical features in polylogues featuring trust-repair messages and their reception in digital media rhetorical sub-arenas through a multilevel annotation. We showcase our procedure taking as as a case in point the”The Facts about Facebook” article published by Mark Zuckerberg along with newspaper articles and forum posts commenting on it. Besides uncovering the reasoning and rhetorical strategies used by Facebook CEO, we show what arguments are perceived as controversial by the public. We plan to empirically validate our methodology through larger annotation projects with the final aim to scale up our analysis through the use of argument mining technologies.