Kony2012: Wrong or Right?

The non-profitable organization the Invisible Children has sparked a lot of controversy since uploading their 30 minute online campaign video on YouTube on March 5^th. The ‘Kony2012’ video went viral in days reaching 40 million plus views.

Now normally if a campaign was this successful so quickly and reached the amount of people that this did it would be a good thing, but the campaign has received a lot of backlash and criticism from a diverse range of people. People like researcher Charlie Beckett feel that the campaign has been over simplified and is wrong in content, tactics, strategy, ethics and politics. He  and many others feel that the campaign misrepresents reality, is misguided,  reinforces the idea that Africa cannot save itself and needs help from ‘the West’ and that the campaign shows that social media can make bad messages more effective. Now this is not to say that they don’t believe the organization has done some good work in East Africa, but just that their campaign is wrong.

Personally I think that Jason Russell, co-founder of the organization should be commended on his effort. I have never seen such an effective campaign, I mean the video went viral within days and is still being played. He was able to use social media to the best of his advantage and the result was amazing. I truly believe that other organizations should take notes of his strategy. However I agree with the criticism about the content of the video. I believe that the matter was over simplified and that information was misleading, because the video did not show the whole picture.

Another issue with this campaign was that no one seemed to care about what the people of Uganda thought. Malcom Webb however looked into this aspect of the campaign. What he found was that the people of Uganda were very upset about the video as they believed it failed to really show the atrocities that the LRA had committed and how they are still struggling to rebuild lives. 'It seems that the while the film has a viral power never seen before in the online community, it did not go down nearly so well with the very people it claims it is meant to help' (Webb 2012). When considering this, you have to ask yourself then was this really a successful campaign? I mean if the people your meant to be helping are not satisfied then really what justice can you really hope to bring them?

As I said earlier, I really do believe that Jason Russell should be commended on his effort, because he brought to light an issue that many people did not know existed but one that I think people needed to know about. However Malcom Webb and Charlie Beckett's articles make me think that maybe Russell went about it in the wrong way because what good is a campaign (successful or not), when the people you are fighting for don't believe in it?