Evidence by Data

The internet age has changed how people consume and disseminate information, and how social movments progress. Internet gives everyone the opportunity to shape public conversations, but does this mean that mainstream media is outdated in terms of their ability to create social change? Would it be enough to just have online conversations? How are grassroot online contributors to public discourse influenced by offline landmark events? My research shows that even in the age of the internet, people's perceptions are highly influenced by major offline events. While the internet is a powerful tool for people to connect with each other around a common cause, it alone can fall short of starting a movement. As catalysts, high profile real life events can organically attract people's attention and subsequently shape the conversation online.

Evidence from Wikipedia edit history shows that the disposal of men in high positions dramatically increased public attention to these men and effectively influenced individuals' perception of them. 

From Graph 1, we can see that the pages of the sexual harassment and assult offenders received high volumes of edits after their removal from position. For most of the offenders recorded in the dataset, their pages received more edits in the 20 days after the sexual allegation disposals than the entire 5 months before. For Harvey Weinstein, for example, he has about 1 percent of total edits made before the news outbreak of his sexual assults but over 900 edits made in the three weeks after the news outbreak. 

From the editors' perspective, they also contributed much more to the offenders' pages after the news outbreak. With a few outliers such as BrillLyle, whose edits about T.J.Miller were entirely made before his sexaul misconduct allegations, most editors did not have strong editorial interest in these personalities until they were moved from position for sexual harassment or sexual assult. 

The content of the edits shows that editors' topics of interest also switched after the sexual misconduct allegations. Graph 4 visualizes the frequency of words that appear in the titles of the sections the editors contributed to before the exposure of the offenders' sexual misconducts. The larger the font size of a word, the more edits have been made in a section whose title contains that word. This gives us an estimate of what topics editors care about. Before the allegations, as we can see in Graph 4, most of the edits are made about the personal lives and careers of the personalities, though allegations related with sexual misconduct already caught the attention of some editors.

Graph 5 uses the same method to display the editorial interest of Wikipedia editors after the sexual misconduct allegations. This time, sexual assult and sexual harrasment allegations were at the center of editors' attention. We can see that high profile events successfully directed people's attention to the sexual misconduct of these men. The editors did not only start to pay more attention to the sexual misconducts, but also believed them to be essential facts about these personalities. Their edtis subsequently affected how the readers of these Wikipedia pages believe about the personalities in question.