Big Data Sensors of Organic Advocacy: The Case of Leonardo DiCaprio and Climate Change

Abstract

The strategies that experts have used to share information about social causes have historically been top-down, meaning the most influential messages are believed to come from planned events and campaigns. However, more people are independently engaging with social causes today than ever before, in part because online platforms allow them to instantaneously seek, create, and share information. In some cases this “organic advocacy” may rival or even eclipse top-down strategies. Big data analytics make it possible to rapidly detect public engagement with social causes by analyzing the same platforms from which organic advocacy spreads. To demonstrate this claim we evaluated how Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 Oscar acceptance speech citing climate change motivated global English language news (Bloomberg Terminal news archives), social media (Twitter postings) and information seeking (Google searches) about climate change. Despite an insignificant increase in traditional news coverage (54%; 95%CI: -144 to 247), tweets including the terms “climate change” or “global warming” reached record highs, increasing 636% (95%CI: 573–699) with more than 250,000 tweets the day DiCaprio spoke. In practical terms the “DiCaprio effect” surpassed the daily average effect of the 2015 Conference of the Parties (COP) and the Earth Day effect by a factor of 3.2 and 5.3, respectively. At the same time, Google searches for “climate change” or “global warming” increased 261% (95%CI, 186–335) and 210% (95%CI 149–272) the day DiCaprio spoke and remained higher for 4 more days, representing 104,190 and 216,490 searches. This increase was 3.8 and 4.3 times larger than the increases observed during COP’s daily average or on Earth Day. Searches were closely linked to content from Dicaprio’s speech (e.g., “hottest year”), as unmentioned content did not have search increases (e.g., “electric car”). Because these data are freely available in real time our analytical strategy provides substantial lead time for experts to detect and participate in organic advocacy while an issue is salient. Our study demonstrates new opportunities to detect and aid agents of change and advances our understanding of communication in the 21st century media landscape.

Leveraging Big Data for Exploring Occupational Diseases-Related Interest at the Level of Scientific Community, Media Coverage and Novel Data Streams: The Example of Silicosis as a Pilot Study

“…[40–42] Twitter has been used to investigate interest toward a wide range of diseases, such as cancer or infectious diseases, among others. It has been exploited to quantitatively assess the effect of advocacy as well [42] or the impact of scientific conferences. [43]…”

Role of Social Media as a Soft Power Tool in Raising Public Awareness and Engagement in Addressing Climate Change

“…As it can be seen at the graph, there was an increase of 25% (44-55 RSV) in the relative searches value within the five-year period relating to 'climate change' after DiCaprio's speech at the Academy Awards event. A more detailed study by Leas et al [35] has found that one hour after DiCaprio spoke, searches increased by 261%, the day after the speech the values stayed at 78%, and steadily crawled down to 39% in the next 4 days. When compared to the COP and Earth Day, the study identifies that the searches volume at the day of his acceptance speech were 3.8 and 4.3 times higher than the daily average during those previous events, respectively [35].…”

Global reach and engagement

“…While he has spoken on environment issues in the past, this was an event with global coverage garnering a broader reach. Recent research 7 looks at the impact of DiCaprio's acceptance speech on the media coverage, tweets and Google searches of 'climate change' or 'global warming' . While traditional media studied showed little change, there were over 250,000 related tweets that day -a 636% increase on expectations.…”