KONY 2012 by Invisible Children
By Jasmine Subrata
On March 5, 2012, American advocacy group Invisible Children uploaded a 30-minute video that would change the course of online history. The video constructed a portrait of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a guerrilla group that operated for more than 2 decades in Uganda and have migrated to the neighboring African countries. The mission of the video was simple; to increase awareness of this atrocity and in turn, convince the U.S. government to help regional forces remove Kony from the battlefield. The campaign’s call to action was threefold; wear the bracelet, sign the pledge, share the film. Three little statements with an unprecedented global movement. According to Visible Measures (2012), the Kony 2012 campaign became the most viral campaign in history, reaching 100 million views in its first six days.
The campaign utilized different social platforms in order to spread the message. The video was uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo, where it quickly spread like wildfire across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr. Kony 2012 became much more than a video, it became a crusade against the warlord.
Strengths
The Kony 2012 campaign video was emotionally and aesthetically appealing to a large audience. The video was created by Jason Russell, a film graduate of USC who had traveled to the village of Gulu, Uganda in 2003 to document the crisis. The video was the eleventh installment from Invisible Children but was the first to feature Jacob, a young Ugandan boy who was one of the 30,000 child soldiers forcefully enlisted by the LRA. By juxtaposing Jacob’s hardships with the average American life of Russell’s own child, Gavin, the audience found it more relatable. Jacob became the unintended ambassador for the thousands of child soldiers in central Africa, and Gavin became the personification of the audience’s comfortable life. Moreover, the video used current songs in order to relate to the common American youth, giving the audience a sense of belonging for an issue halfway across world. By comparing the life of Gavin and Jacob, it gave the audience a sense of guilt, which subsequently encourages them to act. “[Kony 2012] appealed to the growing sense of connectedness between human beings that was first made possible by the Internet. It tapped into the common empathy of a group of people all focused on one screen, impelling them to move beyond the solitude of sitting at their computers towards telling everyone they know, and donating.” (Bailyn cited in Jones 2013).
Kony 2012 combined online and offline initiatives and targeted uninformed youths to create a global movement. The accessibility of the subject material allowed the audience to experience a form of empowerment and no longer rendered them as passive consumers (Cavanagh 2012). The campaign sparked a public debate amongst the audience, ranging from teenagers, bloggers, politicians, celebrities, to news reporters. It became not only a movement for the middle-class American teenager, but for anyone willing to support it. The campaign did beyond the realm of online awareness, because Kony 2012 spread to the streets of major cities around the world. The $30 Action Kit, which included bracelets, shirts, stickers, and posters, was internationally mailed for a worldwide event on April 20, 2012 entitled ‘Cover The Night’. Its mission was to pressure the government into capturing Kony by covering city streets with banners, murals and posters. This act challenged the passivity of consumers and by integrating online clicktivism—which generally have limited shelf life—with real world activism (Drumbl 2012). The democratic nature of social media allowed young people—most of whom had no interest or knowledge about the central or eastern African crises—to engage in humanitarian affairs. University of California carried out a survey on teenagers who supported Invisible Children and found that their political engagement had spread to other social issues (Cadwalladr 2013).
Weaknesses
With the visibility of Invisible Children came the rise of criticisms about the accuracy of the video. The strength and size of the LRA was also a major exaggeration, because it has been reported by many, including Russell himself on the TODAY Show after the video release, that the LRA army has dwindled down to a mere 200. Far from the numbers presented in the video, which gave the illusion that 30,000 children were still active in the army. But what the video failed to add was that those numbers were taken between 1997-2001, and some of the children were only taken for short amounts of time, such as one day (Schomerus, Allen & Vlassenroot 2012). Thurston (cited in Cavanagh 2012) reported that the LRA is one of several rebel groups operating in East/Central Africa and is neither the largest nor the most harmful. In addition, unlike the images brought forth by Russell, the child soldiers do not often carry weapons. Drumbl (2012) explained that most of the child soldiers were neither forcibly conscripted nor abducted, and could exit the armed forces on their own volition. “It may amount to strategic short-term media outreach to portray child soldiers as passive clueless victims, as devastated, and as dehumanized tools of war robotically programmed to kill in purportedly senseless African wars.”
Since Kony 2012 was bred online, so were all the facts and criticisms regarding the campaign. The 30-minute video was not well received by the Ugandans, and one Ugandan blogger who resided in Canada made a video response regarding Kony’s apparent death years ago. Controversial articles exposed the audience to the other side of the LRA, one that painted a more politically correct and current picture of the issue at hand. These articles started trending on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, which negated the effects of the campaign. The facts, figures, and reality of the LRA came as a shock to the audience, which subsequently led to a low turnout for the global event of ‘Cover The Night’, despite the fact that 3.5 million people pledged online to participate (Carroll cited in Jones 2013). This led to the quick fall of Kony 2012’s campaign, as seen in the figure below by Google Trends.
The negative press surrounding the campaign led to the controversy about the integrity of Invisible Children. According to Cavanagh (2012), the portrayal of the LRA crisis was not to create awareness but to maximize the amount of revenue for the agency. Reports regarding the allocation of the funds began to spread on the Internet, showing that Invisible Children used a majority of their budget on media-related campaigns and not to directly help the Ugandans. Russell was also suspected of embezzling a fair amount of money from the charity. The group had to publish five years worth of audited accounts online to prove their efforts were genuine. Charity Navigator reported that it spent upwards of 80% of its budget on its programs and services, outperforming most charities in their database (Cadwalladr 2013). Russell was also suspected of being a narcissist, a megalomanic, and a sufferer of the white savior industrial complex. The plethora of criticisms proved too much for Russell, which led to a public breakdown where he ran naked down a San Diego street corner. This, too, became a viral video, to which he apologized and explained his brief reactive psychosis to news outlets.
Conclusion
The Kony 2012 campaign was undoubtedly the fastest and most influential campaign in the history of the Internet. It received 100 million views in less than a week by utilizing different social media platforms and taking advantage of the slacktivism in consumers. By oversimplifying the situation in central Africa and promoting a problem that seems to be technically solvable, it made everyone who got involved an unlikely hero in the story. “Alas, there is no real solution offered here, only publicity. And raising consciousness would be great, if coupled with long-term informed attention rather than a mainly U.S.-based buzz.” (Schomerus, Allen & Vlassenroot 2012). Kony 2012 also combined online campaigns with offline elements to create a global movement. However, there were many implications surrounding the campaign, mainly the manipulation of facts for strategic purposes and the exaggeration of the LRA’s abductions and murders. In the end, the negative press surrounding the campaign doused the fire sparked by the video, and the fall of Kony 2012 came just as quickly as its rise.
