We all know that the world we live in has a lot of problems, including pollution, wars, hunger and many others. But we often ignore them until something provokes us to pay more attention.
In 2016, a team of researchers found out that Charlie Sheen’s statement that he has HIV lead to drastic increasing of the media attention to this virus.
Now, there is a new proof that celebrities are quite successful at attracting attention to huge issues. When Leonardo DiCaprio talked about climate changes during his Oscar speech this lead to many tweets and also Google searches on this topic.
According to John Ayers from San Diego State University the speech of the actor during the Oscar ceremony resulted in the most significant increase in public engagement with global climate changes ever. The scientist considers that the actor influenced the public engagement on the problem quite a lot.
DiCaprio is a winner of the Oscar for best actor on “The Revenant”. During his speech he stated that the film was about the relationship between man and Nature.The actor explained that the film production had to move to the southern tip of the Earth in order to find snow. DiCaprio states that climate changes are real and require urgent measures. When the actor made this statement, 34.5 million people around the world were watching.
During their research, Ayers and the other members of his team used a combination of various media coverage searches. They used the Bloomberg Terminal, Google trends search data and Twitter content searches.
They made modeling in order to estimate the potentialtraditional media and social media coverage on climate changes if Leonardo DiCaprio had not spoken about this. The results of the research showedthat even when there was virtually no significant media response to DiCaprio’s speech, the social media reactions and the Google search response were absolutely enormous.
The research discovered that the Tweets mentioning climate changes or global climate warming were the amazing 636 percent higher than the expected ones for the day DiCaprio spoke to show his appreciation for his Oscar reward.
According to the authors of the research, after DiCaprio spoke, the total number of Tweets which included “climate change” and “global warming” reached the highest value, recorded in the database - more than 250,000 tweets for that day.
The situation was quite similar with the Google searches. They also increased dramatically. They formed the third highest total number of searches for global warming or climate change ever recorded.
According to the author Ayers this means that when celebrities speak out on social problems, this makes a real difference. Their opinion significantly influences the social attitude, even if no information appears in the traditional news. Since social media has significantly increased their influence, they are quite effective in distributing news and opinions.
The more generalconclusion is that celebrities should be actively engaged in speaking loud for climate changes and pollution and attracting the attention of society.