What Facebook and Twitter Mean for News. By Amy Mitchell & Tom Rosenstiel of PEJ, and Leah Christian of the Pew Research Center Perhaps no topic in technology attracted more attention in 2011 than the rise of social media and its potential impact on news.
“If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next,” we wrote in a May 2011 report analyzing online news behavior called Navigating News Online. Uganda: the hidden agenda behind "Kony 2012" video [Voltaire Network] According to their website, the American NGO, Invisible Children, claims now to have had over 80 million viewers to their YouTube video, “Kony2012,” since its release on a few weeks ago.
![Uganda: the hidden agenda behind "Kony 2012" video [Voltaire Network]](http://cdn.pearltrees.com/s/pic/th/uganda-hidden-agenda-behind-50582196)
For anyone with the patience to sit through the entire video, it is questionable how truthful the figure of 80 million viewers is. Eighty million is unprecedented in YouTube history by all accounts. The video features such prominent Hollywood personalities as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady GaGa, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and other notables. It’s a slick, sentimental story directed by Jason Russell, a 33-year-old now-hospitalized American filmmaker who apparently just underwent a bizarre mental disconnect on the streets of San Diego. [1] The YouTube video depicts a young Ugandan, Jacob Acaye, whom Russell claims he befriended some ten years earlier after Acaye escaped conscription into Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as an 11-year-old killer.
Joseph Kony. If you ever had any doubt the media was controlled...