• Framing Trump: How do The Trump Administration, The Guardian and Greenpeace USA frame issues on Twitter during the first 100 days of the Trump Presidency? Abstract: This paper analyses four Twitter users - @RealDonaldTrump, @POTUS, @Greenpeaceusa, and @GuardianUS - during the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s Presidency, and highlights the methods used by each user to frame contemporary political and social issues to their followers. It is found that each user frames issues differently to other users in the study, with contrasts most clearly observed between @Greenpeaceusa and @GuardianUS, on one side, and @RealDonaldTrump and @POTUS, on the other. These findings are supplemented with humanities scholars such as Marres, Scheufele, Tewksbury, and more. The paper relies on the Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Tool (DMI-TCAT) for data accumulation and subsequent research investigations. Key Words: Donald Trump, POTUS, The Guardian, Greenpeace USA, Framing, Agenda Setting, Twitter, US Politics. 2 Table of Contents Section 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Introduction and Research Question ............................................................................................ 5 1.2 Clarification of Research Question and Research Limits .............................................................. 5 1.3 Definition of Platform ................................................................................................................... 6 1.4 Intro to Twitter as a platform of study ......................................................................................... 6 Section 2: Academic Literature Review .................................................................................................. 8 2.1 Definition of Framing and Agenda-Setting ................................................................................... 8 2.2 Marres’ Issue Networks and Further Research Justification ...................................................... 10 2.3 Description of Twitter Specificities ............................................................................................. 11 2.4 Description of some wider issues in US Politics and Society ...................................................... 12 2.5 Description of Users and Pre-Research Expectations ................................................................. 15 2.5.0 Introduction to Users ........................................................................................................... 15 2.5.1 Greenpeace description and original expectations ............................................................. 17 2.5.2 The Guardian description and original expectations ........................................................... 17 2.5.3 President Trump description and original expectations ...................................................... 18 2.5.4 Summary of Pre-Research Expectations .............................................................................. 19 Section 3: Methodology........................................................................................................................ 20 3.1 Key research features to guide Methods .................................................................................... 20 3.2 Creation of Manual List of Concrete Events ............................................................................... 21 3.3 Creation of 10-day groups .......................................................................................................... 22 3.4 Specific Methods of Capture ....................................................................................................... 23 3.5 ‘Masterlist’ Creation ................................................................................................................... 24 3.6 Creation of Tweet Categories ..................................................................................................... 25 3.7 Methodology Problematics ......................................................................................................... 28 3.8 Methodology Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 29 Section 4: Findings ................................................................................................................................ 30 4.1 Findings Introduction .................................................................................................................. 30 4.2 Basic Stats Overview ................................................................................................................... 30 4.3 Category Findings ........................................................................................................................ 33 4.3.0 Summary of Created Categories .......................................................................................... 33 4.3.1 Category Findings @RealDonaldTrump ............................................................................... 34 3 4.3.2 Category Findings @POTUS ................................................................................................. 35 4.3.3 Category Findings @Greenpeaceusa ................................................................................... 36 4.3.4 Category Findings @guardianUS .......................................................................................... 37 4.4 Word Repetition investigations .................................................................................................. 38 Section 5: Discussion and Conclusion ................................................................................................... 41 5.1 Discussion Intro ........................................................................................................................... 41 5.2 Discussion of Framing and Agenda-Setting efforts during 10-day Group Periods ..................... 41 5.3 Summary of Discussion; Connection to Literature ..................................................................... 66 5.5 Thesis Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 68 Section 6: Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... 70 Section 7: Appendices........................................................................................................................... 75 7.1 Appendix 1 of 2 ........................................................................................................................... 75 7.2 Appendix 2 of 2 ........................................................................................................................... 81 4 Section 1: Introduction 1.1 Introduction and Research Question In his recent book, Insane Clown President, authored during the most recent US Primary and Presidential elections, journalist Matt Taibbi offers a fascinating, behind-the-scenes insight into one of the most polarising democratic processes in recent memory. Donald J. Trump, once of reality television fame, has become The Leader of the Free WorldTM, and is in the process of leaving his indelible Trumpian stamp on the role. Taibbi, whose views are at times almost aggressively liberal, combines furious self-searching and disappointment with a clear narrative of events, in the process providing many starting points for a thesis such as this. For instance, his claim that “Trump will one day be in the Twitter Hall of Fame. His fortune-cookie mind … is perfectly engineered for the medium” (28), although disparaging in the extreme, has at its centre a degree of truth. Although the implications are not fully clear yet, social media has been widely attributed great importance in the 2016 US elections, with many voters utilizing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, both as sounding-boards for their own opinions, and for unverified - in the traditional sense - sources of news and election coverage (The Verge). New Media academics have recognised the growing importance of social media to current events, and have begun to research in detail the ways in which social media have changed the landscape for national debates (Bruns and Burgess, 2012). Therefore, the following research question is posed: - How do The Trump Administration, The Guardian, and Greenpeace USA frame issues on Twitter during the first 100 days of the Trump Presidency? 1.2 Clarification of Research Question and Research Limits Frames, framing theory and the discussion of wider agendas, all of which will be defined in the opening sections of this paper, are the key focus of this study. Twitter offers many avenues of exploration to researchers; however, this paper is concerned with the frames themselves, and trying to identify the key framing techniques used by the users studied over President Trump’s opening 100 days in office. By extension, it is not concerned with other potential explorations made possible by the Twitter platform. Therefore, a successful paper will; identify the key characteristics of each user’s tweets; discuss how these characteristics compare and contrast to other users in the study; and discuss the impact of such efforts with relation to the ideas of academics in the wider field of Twitter studies. This will