Invisible Children: Can a viral video help Africa?

“What has happened in the past week has been momentous,” said Matthew Green in the Financial Times. A small, obscure group of activists known as Invisible Children has sparked a global conversation, by posting a half-hour video online about Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord who for a quarter-century has been abducting children and using them as soldiers in his rebel army. Thanks to Invisible Children’s strategic use of social media, including convincing celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Rihanna, Diddy, and Justin Bieber to recommend the video via Twitter and Facebook, more than 110 million people watched “Kony 2012” in a week—making it the most rapidly spreading viral clip in the history of the Internet. Critics were quick to charge Invisible Children’s “slacktivists” with simplifying Uganda’s complex politics, said Ivor Tossell in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Kony, “a suitable villain,” is used in the video as a proxy to explain everything that’s wrong with Uganda and with Africa as a whole. Still, this “burst of energy from our connected youth” shows the public-policy potential of social media.

Please—don’t be so naïve, said Mark Kersten in Salon.com. Yes, Joseph Kony has committed atrocities, but so has the government he’s fighting. Invisible Children’s “dangerously simple message” is that Western nations should intervene to capture Kony. The sad reality is that war has been raging in that region of Africa since 1986, and the incursion of foreign forces has always resulted in “more violence, more killings, and more abductions.” The self-congratulatory tone of the video—in which young people hitting “share” buttons are portrayed as the world’s best hope—seems to suggest that it is the “white man’s burden” of American hipsters armed with smartphones to save Africans from themselves.

Joseph Kony isn’t even in Uganda anymore, said James Arinaitwe in TheDailyBeast.com. He fled into the jungle of neighboring countries at least five years ago, with a few hundred followers. Last year, President Obama sent special operations troops to help coordinate regional efforts by several African governments to find him. With that hunt on, most of us Ugandans “would rather close this dark chapter of our history and move on.” Our most pressing problems in 2012 involve health care, the economy, and education—“neither dramatic nor sexy” enough to inspire the Facebook generation.

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To call widespread attention to Africa’s many problems, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post, groups like Invisible Children have to simplify. Professional foreign-policy experts “who multiply complexity for a living” may think Africa should only be discussed in white papers no one reads. But “the pursuit of Kony is urgent,” and the online campaign will guarantee that governments keep the pressure up until he’s brought to justice. Capturing Kony would send an important signal to other thugs in Africa, said Nicky Woolf in the London Guardian. Meanwhile, “anything that shines a light on the atrocities that are an almost daily occurrence in this region is a good thing.”

The backlash against “Kony 2012” is also a good thing, said Rebecca Rosen in TheAtlantic.com. The Internet is now buzzing with discussions by informed scholars, activists, and journalists about Ugandan history, African colonialism, and the best way for outsiders to help that continent. The Internet can spread simplistic, and even bad, ideas, but its beauty is that it’s a self-correcting ecosystem. By engaging tens of millions of people, a simplistic video has sparked a debate that may “reshape how Americans and others in the West understand the politics and pitfalls of aid and development around the world.”