I’ve been fascinated with the Honey scandal as it’s spread around YouTube. Both the video by MegaLag that touched everything off (I urge you to go watch it unless you’ve got blood pressure problems, because it might make you pretty damn angry) and the reactions as YouTube influencers learn that they’ve been scammed (I am at this moment listening to Nuxanor have a meltdown) are intense. The scope of this, if Honey is actually doing everything it’s being accused of, is almost unbelievable.

As I’ve been following this story I’m consistently seeing three names associated with it: Honey (obviously), PayPal (because it owns Honey) and Markiplier (a YouTube influencer who expressed his concerns about Honey in 2019, a clip of which is currently being circulated.)

I was curious to see if this public controversy had bumped their Wikipedia page views, so I put them in Wikipedia Seismograph. And yes, everybody got a view bump! Honey’s was highest, but PayPal had a view spike too. Even Markiplier seems to have gotten a little jump.

Now we have these three topics linked together via this single controversy. I’m curious to see if there’s a way I can explore those associations in the past or even in a contemporary way? I have three concepts bundled via a single evolving topic. There’s got to be something I can do with that.