Conveying transparency on social media: a cross-cultural comparison of exemplification strategies in public transport Instagram posts

In large metropolises, public transport plays a crucial role in the daily lives of residents and visitors. Accordingly, government bodies responsible for transportation networks are now increasingly active on social media, using them strategically to boost transparency. While the use of social media by governmental bodies has been positively associated with transparency and enhanced trust, limited research has been carried out on the use of Instagram by the public transport sector. This comparative study investigates the use of exemplification as a strategy to present transparent information in an accessible way across two corpora of Instagram posts of Transport for London (TfL) and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) as two transport providers representing the British and American linguacultures. Methodologically, this paper applies methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies to investigate exemplification markers from a comparative perspective and explores how they can serve as devices for conveying transparency. The analysis found that MTA uses exemplification markers more extensively than TfL, emphasizing transparency in service-related information, while TfL primarily employs exemplification markers in promotional-oriented contexts. Furthermore, results were also considered from a cross-cultural perspective, revealing a more individualistic approach and higher adherence to social conventions for TfL, and a more community-oriented one for MTA.