Invisible Children: Can a viral video help Africa?

A half-hour online video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has sparked a global conversation.

“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.

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