Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A scientific study has attempted to analyse the impact of a recent Leonardo DiCaprio climate speech on Twitter and other social media – and has concluded a DiCaprio speech is better value than a COP conference.
Big Data Sensors of Organic Advocacy: The Case of Leonardo DiCaprio and Climate Change
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.
Read more: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0159885#ack
I guess we can look forward to jetset climate hero Leonardo DiCaprio being bombarded with even more official honorary climate roles, as well as lavish sponsorship offers from anyone who wants to sell an electric car.
How depressing anyone takes him seriously.
Oh boy!…yet another “peer-reviewed” paper, tinkering with and tweaking the hive’s wanker-normative con-artistry, from that cutting-edge and unfailingly paradigm-busting branch of hive-science that specializes in turnin’ out gimcrack, marketing tips-and-tricks for the use of its myriad “agents-of-change”, hired-guns, hucksters, flim-flammers, hype-masters, puffery-pushers, sweet-talkers, wheedling-geekballs, green-washed opportunists, tenured bull-shitters, spoiled-brat dumb-kids, useless-dorks-with-hive-mummy-connections, and all the other, mutant, blood-meal-based, good-comrade life-forms and their bot-replicant spin-offs contained within that grab-bag of grifters the hive employs to seal-the-deal for its signature Gaia-hustle scam and build a better, agit-prop rip-off. Like I said…Oh boy!
Haven’t we seen this movie before? And, oh by the way, can’t the hive find, for once, some air-head, pretty-boy celebrity-lickspittle, who is not also an in-your-face, grotesquely obscene example of your basic, sell-out, brazen-hypocrite, carbon-piggie eco-bootlicker, to star in at least one of its interminable, street-theater productions? And must everything, with which the hive’s organs come in contact, instantly sink into a sloganeering, motor-mouth, mind-numbing miasma of Orwellian, double-think, crapulous*, party-line cant and group-think, Lysenkoist orthodoxy? But, then, us “good guy” lovers of Liberty and ethical science know the answers to all the above questions. Keeps us goin’–and then some.
*Contrary to what the lefty-infiltrated, in-on-the-deal, so-called “Dictionary community” would have you believe, dear reader, to the contrary, the natural and rightful definition of “crapulous” is “full of crap”, or for those of you who prefer the slightly more crass, but traditional, High-Renaissance, Italian-derived alternative–“full of crapola”.
Nice! And Cook’s enc etc for the Cooking aka Rigging.
Well, people were actually researching his points, which is a valid point of analysis, and this is using real, measured data instead of proxies or analyses. While I would put high bars of error on any conclusion, I would say that we can definitely say a single public speech given in a lay forum is far more effective than a giant conference preached to the choir.
Of course, this has been well known for millenia. It wasn’t Brutus’s or Cicero’s speeches to the Senate that stirred people to action, but Mark Antony’s public funeral oration for Caesar that caused rioting in the streets of Rome after the Ides of March.
Ben
I think that speech by Marc Antony is probably the most powerful speech in English Literature – that I have read.
It is – in the play – the wording of Shakespeare.
I don’t know whether it had any historic basis; I think the wording, the rhythm, the oratorical devices all came from the late 16th Century – if influenced by the great Classic orators.
Auto
While the actual text of the speech didn’t survive, and Cicero wasn’t at the funeral to comment on it, we do have records of the speech, and the riot that followed.
http://www.livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-caesars-funeral/
It didn’t start with “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” though
Do do not pretend to understand this at all. Who gives a hoot what Leonardo DiCaprio says about anything? Are we a species of idiots who think actors have some special or relevant knowledge about climate science?
Wait: There’s Alar, Autism from vaccinations, fracking all of which were quite heavily influenced by celebrities. So the answer to your question may indeed be “yes”.
I always defer to that noted agronomist and toxicologist Meryl Streep.
Yes.
We pay people to entertain us, to amuse us. If they sing and dance very well, we sometimes reward them very well.
Should I ever require Mr DiCaprio’s opinion on anything, I will surely send him a check.
I wonder if DiCaprio has learned the difference yet, between “Glo.Bull Warming” and a “Chinook Wind” ?
http://www.calgarysun.com/2015/12/09/its-a-chinook-leo-albertans-respond-to-dicaprios-climate-experience-while-filming-the-revenant
He made a movie on a beach once, what more qualifications do you need!!
The Rising Sea Level obviously missed.
Right at the moment I’m reading 1984. That extract above could have been lifted directly from it.
I suspect any attention gained by people like him will be fleeting and of no lasting detriment to society
Jenny McCarthy has had a lasting effect on many people’s lives.
“I guess we can look forward to jetset climate hero Leonardo DiCaprio being bombarded with even more official honorary climate roles, as well as lavish sponsorship offers from anyone who wants to sell an electric car.” And I am sure he will ensure he make personal appearances by using his low CO2 footprint jet to get there. Maybe Al Gore will fly the same flight path to join him.
Celebrities. Is there anything they don’t know? 🙂
that’s how goofy the climate movement is. it’s a circus. the clowns rule.
Arne get down of that tower before you get hurt.
Ah – but they don’t know why people were looking for said content. Skeptics look for his quotes as well – but not because of any positive effect he’s had on how people view climate change. I certainly go after quotes made by alarmists for other reasons…you know…like Obama saying “the planet will boil over.” I suspect that if I were to do a search for DiCaprio’s speech, I would find plenty of the same kind of fodder, lol.
Agreed; my first thought also. An increase in Google Searches does not indicate agreement; but I think the term was “engagement”. Skeptics of the world, engage!
In an era where George Clooney operates a satellite to monitor hostilities between to nations in Africa, “climate awareness advocacy” isn’t even “bumper sticker on a burned out car in a scrap yard” level of commitment yet it is rewarded with actual $$s.
Actually, “global warming” jumped the shark a long time ago as a “fashionable” advocacy “cause.” Today it’s all about Racism, Hating, Homophobes, Trans-phobes, and Black Lives Matter. I don’t think nearly as many people are hanging on ol’ Leo’s words as he thinks. Teen-heartthrob movie “Titanic” was a generation ago now, and The Man Himself is turning into a paunchy dirty old man who looks like a low-level gangster. He’s not anything close to a “scientist,” and I think a lot of people have had a major bellyful of agitprop in general and “activist” talking heads in particular. The best thing we can do is ignore him and all his kind.
“…The Man Himself is turning into a paunchy dirty old man who looks like a low-level gangster.”
He did that role too, in Gangs of New York. To me, he occasionally looks like Jack Nicholson, but seems to be edging closer to Orson Welles. Watch the waistline, and the leftist activism, also more Welles than Nicholson, a liberal Democrat who plays both sides.
“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.”
Standard cointelpro (counter intelligence program) practice, and Climate Change inc. is after all the official top priority of the US Gov . . Do the math, I suggest ; )
Great methodology! Now you just need to differentiate between:
“Caprio talked about climate change – there must be something in it…” and
“Caprio talked about climate change – what a wanker…”
UN, White House et al. may be ditching Mr. DiCaprio given his (his film and film company, remember the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’) involvement in the ongoing 1MDB (One Malaysian Development Bank) scandal.
Ref.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/leo-dicaprios-cameo-role-in-1mdbs-growing-drama-1469143226
http://www.thewrap.com/wolf-of-wall-street-fbi-1mdb/
Twitter is a Left echo chamber … is anybody surprised?
It is the train wreck effect. Take something conspicuous, involve it in an event that is unexpected, and many people will watch just to see how it ends. Some will even become fascinated by the details. That doesn’t mean they want to be a part of it, though.
Kevin Kostner would be even better, “After the melting of the polar ice caps, most of the globe is underwater. Some humans have survived, and even fewer still, notably the Mariner (Kevin Costner), have adapted to the ocean by developing gills.”
The opening scene is marvelous! North America is covered in water to a depth of hundreds of feet greater than all the water on the surface of the Earth and probably the crust as well.
I had a good laugh when one of the characters pointed to the Mariner’s gills. (I never read the spoilers, so was taken by surprise.)
You don’t need scientific facts to make a good story.
Climate communication and advocacy from an actor who by all accounts has the carbon footprint of a small nation i.e. yachts, multiple mansion size homes and a private jet or two…
Precisely. They should now do a “study” on that to see how well all that detracts from his “communication” prattle.
Right up there with Obama!
I like Leonardo. He is so cool, and so handsome, and so hip. And saved that poor lonely suicidal chick in that iceberg movie. Whatever he says is ok with me.
I hear there are some openings in Caracas for useful idiots, especially the Hollywood types.
Someone should do an on the street survey of what people think Leo actually knows about climate science and then reveal some actual answers Leo gave to climate science questions, and we call can have a laugh because everyone is wrong.
Andrew
He’s a good actor, like oh so many of these thesbians are! Trouble is, they are actors, NOT technically minded nor competent people, (apart from Harrison Ford who at least started out as a carpenter!). When they portray “scientists” on screen I doubt much that they have a clue what dialogue they are spouting in their on screen pretence!
Odd, I wouldn’t think there would be that many lesbian actors, or that he’d be one of them.
“Big data analytics make it possible to rapidly detect public engagement with social causes by analyzing the same platforms from which organic advocacy spreads.”
This is nonsense, with most large and dis-organized data sets it’s next to impossible to find a significant and non-spurious “anything.” Many threads on purely social platforms quickly devolve into nonsense. In marketing and communications it’s common for decision makers to lean on spurious relationships only because something is better than nothing at all, (association to an association is better than random scatter).
The notion that there were 250,000 tweets that linked DiCaprio to climate change doesn’t mean anything more than there was parroting of the parrot. DiCaprio parrots all the buzz words. His diehard fans parrot the parrot. In terms of traditional models of learning there is nothing real going on here.
They’re de-evolving rapidly from eating nothing but kale, with their sperm counts lowering apace. Fear not!
Could be worse, trust me. Here in Canada, we have a True Climate Change Believer Prime Minister who is more famous for taking his shirt off than actually having a third digit to his IQ.
Nice to know that we could dispense with actual democracy and elections and stuff shop for a political leader at the local gym.
Here in Canada, those of us who cannot forget his eminently forgettable father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, will remember that that generation of the family lucked-out … PET actually got a third digit to his IQ, AND he used it (literally) for demonstrating his imperious & dismissive demeanour to the average Joe Voters from train windows. Other genetic traits remain, sadly, intact. Shirt-dropping, pugilist Pretty-Boy will do anything to keep his (politically illiterate) female groupie-fans creaming their jeans and squealing in the bleachers.
Well, as the old joke goes, a Hollywood Starlet wanted to make a baby with Famed Physicist. “Why” she purred, “he’ll have my looks and your brains”. “But dear”, said the scientist, “what if its the other way around?”.
In this case, I supposed the best case scenario that PM Selfie doesn’t have his mother’s brains. Although she doesn’t use them much, maybe he could borrow them on state occasions.