Kony 2012: Will America's Youth Cover the Night. This is a decisive moment in the life and times of Kony 2012.
Will the country’s youth turn out en masse to the campaign’s “Cover the Night” event on Friday April 20th? Uganda Responds To Kony 2012 Video. * Prime minister on YouTube, Twitter to talk about Kony * Wants world to know hunt is on, Kony not in Uganda * U.S. video on war crimes suspect an Internet hit.
Kony 2012 - Action Figure Therapy. Joseph Kony 2012: growing outrage in Uganda over film. 'Kony 2012' Is Not a Revolution - Room for Debate. Guest post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things) - By Michael Wilkerson. Click here to see photos of the evolution of the LRA.
Thanks to an incredibly effective social media effort, #StopKony is trending on Twitter today. The campaign coincides with a new awareness-raising documentary by the group Invisible Children. Former FP intern Michael Wilkerson, now a freelance journalist and grad student at Oxford -- who has lived and reported from Uganda -- contributed this guest post on the campaign. Not alone. - Visible Children - KONY 2012 Criticism. Kony 2012 : pics. Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of 'Kony 2012' - Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub - International. A viral video by a controversial group claims to fix Central African violence with awareness, but such misguided campaigns can do more harm than good.
Members of Invisible Children pose with soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army near the Congo-Sudan border in 2008 / Courtesy Glenna Gordon Have you heard? Joseph Kony, brutal warlord and International Criminal Court indictee, is going to be famous like George Clooney. The reason is Kony 2012, a 30 minute film by the advocacy organization Invisible Children, which has gone viral in the 72 hours since its release, garnering over 38.6 million views on Youtube and Vimeo. It has been retweeted by everyone from Justin Bieber to Oprah, and shared on Facebook by seemingly everyone under the age of 25.
The video opens with a perplexing sequence of home movies. Awareness of their plight achieved, child soldiers are now visible to the naked American eye. The Trouble with #StopKony. If your Twitter and Facebook streams look anything like mine, you have probably become acquainted with the hashtag #stopkony over the last 48 hours.
That’s Joseph Kony—rebel leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) from Northern Uganda and center of a campaign by non-profit advocacy group Invisible Children. For the last three decades, the LRA has terrorized pockets of East Africa, most notoriously abducting children to staff the ranks of an army that long-ago ceased to inspire voluntary recruits. The US-based charity is broadcasting a simple message: If more people know about Kony, know that he’s a bad guy, and call on their governments to go after him, someone actually will get him, and peace and stability will return to Uganda.
KONY 2012 – Invisible Children Awareness Campaign – Read this before sharing their video. Facebook has been inundated with a deluge of KONY 2012 messages, links and status updates – so, what is this all about?
From the KONY 2012 website: Web visitors are met with the statement shown above and are asked to sign the pledge to bring Joseph Kony to justice in 2012. The site also has a 30 minute video that users are asked to watch and share. The caption above the video reads: Watch and Share they have! Kony2012: The Problem With Invisible Children's Viral Video Crusade Against Joseph Kony. Most Americans began this week not knowing who Joseph Kony was.
That’s not surprising: most Americans begin every week not knowing a lot of things, especially about a part of the world as obscured from their vision as Uganda, the country where Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commenced a brutal insurgency in the 1980s that lingers to this day. A viral video that took social media by storm over the past two days has seemingly changed all that. Produced by Invisible Children, a San Diego-based NGO, “Kony2012″ is a half-hour plea for Americans and global netizens to pay attention to Kony’s crimes — which include abducting over 60,000 children over two decades of conflict, brutalizing them and transforming many into child soldiers — and to pressure the Obama Administration to find and capture him.
(VIDEO: The Lord’s Resistance Army Hunts Children in Sudan) It’s an incredible public relations coup for the NGO, which congratulates itself in the film for spurring U.S. Sure. Think Twice Before Donating to Kony 2012, the Charitable Meme du Jour. Sorry!
Gonna have to curse a lot here. BULL. FUCKING. SHIT. It is INCREDIBLY clear that the author took "about the same amount of time to read up on this criticism as it took [her] to watch the video itself. " That "Visible Children" piece is a blog post by some college kid who did no research and has almost no legitimate sources— Invisible Children is a decent org and they are doing good work, and for some reason everyone who felt like clicking around for 2 minutes and finding something incendiary is now posting it around the internet like they've got all the facts because they saw someone write it somewhere.
Of course this kind of thing is ripe for "white man's burden" type criticisms, but so is all charity work in the developing world. Jez, I'm sorry, I usually love you, but QUALITY CONTROL FAIL here. I wrote the little screed below after doing some research and a couple of the people I saw doing this trolling on my facebook actually took it down. Social Media Immediacy: Good, Bad, Ugly plus a little Derp … There is no doubting that one of the potent differentiators of Social Media as a communication channel is its immediacy.
This immediacy results in many different reactions; commonly including informed considered soliloquy, logical passionate adult debates, farce, tragedy, cynical recidivism and ruthless emotional lambasting. Nothing has encapsulated this more than the Kony2012 meme of the past couple of days. Joseph Kony and Crowdsourced Intervention. Jason Russell has an idea, and that idea is to arrest Joseph Kony.
Jason has made a movie to explain how he is putting his idea in motion: crowdsourcing military intervention. Well, he doesn’t quite phrase it in that way, but that is what it amounts to. Armed with #KONY2012 hashtags, posters, bracelets and viral movie clips, Russell aims to make Joseph Kony public enemy number one (on a global level). As the name of a warlord from the middle of the African continent is now the top-trending topic on Twitter, I’d say he’s off to a pretty good start. Let’s make no bones about this, Russell is pretty much on the money about the nature of Kony.
Josh Ozersky: Pink Slime and Problem of Viral Campaigns. It takes a lot of courage to admit this, but I am against eating pink slime. Also, I think that guy in Uganda should stop kidnapping and murdering children. Also, I laughed at the old lady in North Dakota who wrote a rave review of the Olive Garden. Wait, did I say that it took a lot of courage? I meant it took none at all. In the world of viral opinioneering, it takes neither brains nor intelligence nor even a brain of any kind to get on board the bandwagon.
In case you’re not spending a lot of time on Facebook these days, pink slime is an unspeakably vile mixture of beef scraps and connective tissue, which, washed with a goodly amount of ammonia, goes back into the food supply in school cafeterias, fast-food restaurants and maybe even supermarkets.