Five days ago, the Internet was swept up in a fevered do-gooder frenzy, watching and forwarding an online video depicting the brutal actions of a Ugandan warlord and a nonprofit’s sexy, graphic, cause-braceleted plan to capture him. Four days ago, celebrities and Twit-lebrities got involved, with everyone from Justin Bieber to Oprah Winfrey encouraging their multitudinous followers to support Invisible Children, the nonprofit behind “Kony 2012.”
Three days ago, portions of the well-intentioned masses began to question their support. Facts emerged. Invisible Children received a lowish two stars for transparency and accountability on the Web site CharityNavigator.org. And the content of the film, some protested, was muckraking but misleading — failing to acknowledge that Joseph Kony, the Ugandan warlord who recruited and enslaved children, is no longer the threat that he was in the early 2000s. His once-voluminous Lord’s Resistance Army is now thought to number just a few hundred followers. Further, officials believe he is no longer in Uganda.
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A week ago, few Americans knew who Joseph Kony or the Lord's Resistance Army was. But now a video has gone viral raising awareness about Kony and his group's atrocities against humans.
Still, the clicks poured in. As of Friday afternoon, almost 71 million people had watched the video on YouTube or Vimeo; millions more were tweeting about the film using the hashtag #StopKony. Invisible Children chief executive Ben Keesey says he’s been in “absolute shock” over the video’s success. He had been hoping for 500,000 views by May.
“Anybody who does advocacy on this or any other issue is looking very closely at what Invisible Children has done,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The film “proposes that there’s a very concrete way of understanding who is good and who is bad. It’s very simple. It says, ‘Look, all we need to do is catch him.’ ”
The film, directed by and starring activist filmmaker Jason Russell, is a compelling and watchable narrative. In less than 30 minutes, he connects atrocities in Africa with his own moral obligations as a parent — the film intercuts between Russell’s child and a young Ugandan boy he met while visiting Africa — with the prospective desk-sitting viewer’s moral obligation as a citizen of the world. Russell asks supporters to purchase $30 “action packs,” which include the bracelets, and to launch a major postering campaign April 20 in their respective cities.
The hype and hyperbole surrounding “Kony 2012” swelled in the span of a week, but the true test for what it signifies — for the Internet, for activism, for how people want to interact with the world around them — won’t be measurable until April 20 and beyond.
Will activists take to the night, cover the streets in posters, bombard policymakers with phone calls and demands for action? Or did they just want to click and move on?
Plenty of good causes have gone viral online. During the Iranian uprisings of 2009, citizens of Twitter changed their locations to Tehran in shows of solidarity. Online petitions are signed, Facebook statuses are updated, Twitter feeds are cause-jacked.
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