The viral phenomenon Kony 2012: 100 million views for a non-event?

First published in French in Politique africaine, 125, March 2012.

Sandrine Perrot, Sciences Po, Center for International Studies (CERI), France

“We are storytellers. We are visionaries, humanitarians, artists, and entrepreneurs. We are a generation eager for change and willing to pursue it”.
-Invisible Children “Who we are”, Official site, http://www.invisiblechildren.com/index.html

“It’s not the exact accurate story, (…) but for me the film really isn’t about reality. It’s about the transformation of imagination, about creativity, about belief. That basically, if you believe, you can make anything happen.”
-Marc Forster about Finding Neverland, quoted by Kristin Hohenadel, “Behind the Writer Behind Peter Pan”, New York Times, November 7, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/movies/moviesspecial/07hohe.html?pagewanted=print&position

On April 20^th hundreds of thousands of young activists worldwide had been asked to cover the walls of their towns with posters of Joseph Kony to make him famous. That was the call of the young Californian NGO, Invisible Children, that posted the Kony 2012 video on the web. In less than a week, Kony 2012 became the most viral video in the history of the Internet and social media. Invisible Children succeeded in a few days in making Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), famous. The 30-minute video gathered 100 million views in only 6 days after being posted on YouTube, quicker than Britain’s Got Talent performance of Susan Boyle (100 million views in 9 days) and much quicker than Lady Gaga’s video clip Bad Romance (100 million views in 18 days).[1] Coincidentally, Kony 2012 swept across social media sites when, in Uganda, Machine Gun Preacher was premiering (2011).  In this movie, directed by Marc Forster, Sam Childers, a biker, gang member and drug dealer, finds redemption by converting to Christianity and devoting his life to saving child victims of the LRA. Fun fact: Childers had his life-changing moment while watching a TV report about this very conflict.[2] A story that sounds strangely close  to Invisible Children’s origins and mobilisation strategies. But this is fiction. In reality, the transformative power of Kony 2012 is highly debatable. The “Cover the night” event obviously failed in transforming digital activism into action.

Since its creation in 2004 by three students from San Diego, who just returned from a film escapade in northern Uganda facilitated by evangelical networks, Invisible Children has organised many advocacy campaigns on the LRA atrocities, using film production, social actions and happenings in major American towns.[3] It actively took part in the efficient lobbying campaign that led President Obama to sign the LRA Disarmament Act (2010) and subsequently to the deployment of 100 military advisors in Uganda and Central African Republic (CAR) at the end of 2011.

Kony 2012, through the storytelling of LRA victims and classic emotional hooks around universal childhood, lobbies to make the LRA atrocities known world-wide in order to maintain US forces in LRA affected areas and enable the arrest of Joseph Kony before the end of 2012. The video carries along the imprudent use of unverified and unverifiable data, over-simplification, dubious amalgamation (between Kony, Osama Bin Laden and Hitler for example) and factual approximations.[4] All this has been clearly set out in the thousands of critical comments posted on the Internet. The same criticisms had been raised about their first movie Invisible Children: Rough Cuts (2004).[5] But in the end, the innovative nature of this phenomenon does not lie in what the video tells us about Joseph Kony, the LRA, or the resolution of the conflict. The innovation lies in the phenomenon itself and what it reveals about new digital modes of mobilisation of Western youth and the way that youth is redefining –  via social media – its relationship to the world and the concomitant transformation of the humanitarian and fund raising industries.

The IC campaign is front and center in the eruption of social media in the public space. It displays its willingness to cope with the attention deficit disorders of the international community by lessening the impact of classical lobbying and celebrity diplomacy through the virtuosities of video-making and virtual social networks. In terms of conflict resolution, the video as such is a non-event. In northern Uganda, where the LRA hasn’t been active since 2006, the video had little effect beyond provoking anger and frustration among some northern Ugandans at being used for self-promotion and commercialisation purposes. The news on the front burner is far different. The area is plagued by another insecurity, which has attracted much less worldwide awareness: an epidemic of nodding disease that has already affected more than 3000 children. The  causes of the disease are unknown and its eradication would need human and financial resources for research and treatment. The discussions about the LRA are not about arresting Kony but about whether to sue LRA former top commanders for war crimes and crimes against humanity or offer them amnesty.

In Congo or CAR making Kony famous by sharing the video, wearing a bracelet or sticking his poster in Western streets won’t bring any solution to the highly difficult operational terrain, the underlying strategic divisions between Washington, USAID, the State Department and the Defence Department, or the weak coordination and strong tensions between the Ugandan, Congolese and central African militaries deployed since December 2008. The Congolese government, as the government of CAR did before, accused the Ugandan military of taking advantage of the joint mission to illegally exploit Congolese natural resources. As a consequence, the UPDF does not have any official base in the Congo anymore, while the LRA is still very active there.[6] The poorly financed AU mission created on March 23^rd will first have to smooth these recurrent tensions.[7] It will not affect either the extreme mobility of the LRA or its amazing adaptation and organisational mutation capacity. The real tracking of Kony is not played at the top of youths’ lungs in the streets of San Diego, Washington or New York, but quietly, by a few hundred regional soldiers and a handful of US special forces deployed in the Central African Republic. This virtual awareness raised by Kony 2012 though is probably welcomed by the US military to popularly legitimise and give ideological cover for its actions on the ground. And there is little doubt that the video makers will try to claim part of the success, should Kony be arrested.

The video, however, is an event in terms of use of social media for charity.  In spite of its juvenile naiveté appearances, the team of artists, webmasters and young graduates in mass communication and applied maths of IC developed an implacable mastery of viral marketing. The first trailer of the campaign was posted as early as December 2011 on Vimeo, a website dedicated to a more selective screening of high quality videos than YouTube, and dedicated to professional video makers, churches, and humanitarian organisations. The viral diffusion of this video percolated on Vimeo from February 20, 2012 before it exploded a few hours after it was posted on YouTube on March 5, 2012, bypassing UN, government and media agendas to impose their own temporality in bringing the conflict into the spotlight.[8]

Source : Visible Measures[9]

The viral propagation was first provided by the professional Vimeo pre-viewers but also by the previous capillary support networks built among US campuses and evangelical circles when publicising IC’s first movie in 2004 and 2005. IC ensured the after-sale support through an overwhelming presence on all social media sites in order to maximise its referencing (including via an application for mobile phones, the LRA crisis tracker created by IC to map LRA or so-called LRA attacks[10]) and through a multitude of by-products (bracelets, T-shirts, posters, etc.). On its website, Invisible Children targeted a restricted circle of culture and policy makers liable to efficiently diffuse their mobilisation call.  And the whole campaign was widely relieved by sister lobbying groups, like Resole or the Enough Project.

Through a slick aesthetic and an MTV-like jerky rhythm, the video aims for only one audience: the “digital natives” of the American youth. It drills home only one motto – share this video – while convincing Internet users that through this simple and immediate action, they will positively change the world. Light on contextual elements, the video doesn’t aim at comprehension but action. A predefined, reflex-like, clickable action. Invisible Children doesn’t dwell on chocking negative images of the LRA war. They even intersperse them with long positive and self-centred joyful scenes of young IC activists. In a fully uninhibited “Save Darfur” way,[11] Kony 2012 depoliticises and dehistoricises the conflict. It smoothes complexities to raise the digital mobilisation to the rank of a moral cause, of an international solidarity gesture from youth to youth[12]. Fundamentally, the success of this campaign capitalises on a thorough knowledge of the identity aspirations of the “Y generation,”[13] who grew-up in a world where laptops, video games and the Internet define a way of living. On Facebook, Twitter, or on any other social media site, this digital activism defines the Internet user as a person, builds his/her profile, anchors him/her in a community and defines their relationship to the world.[14]

The elevation of this video to the rank of social phenomenon has limits, however. It first questions the financial convertibility of this digital activism. In 2009, the blogger and social scientist, Evgeny Morozov, highlighted that “Saving the children of Africa,” a popular Facebook group gathering 1.2 million members, only raised US $6000  (i.e. half a penny per person).[15] According to The Guardian, Invisible Children collected US $5 million in 48 hours, which – not by dollar amount, but by the time spent to collect it –  ranks this fundraising campaign as one of the fastest in humanitarian history.[16] Time will say if over the months, the youth financial mobilisation (or, through them, their parents) will reach amounts collected by classical campaigning. Secondly, beyond the local controversial echo of the video that led to the cancelling of public screenings in Northern Uganda,[17] one has to question the auto-regulation effects of digital mobilisations, i.e. the backlash effect of counter-mobilisations on the web. The momentum of the video stalled only 15 days after it was posted on the web, and the follow-up video was a flop. It is difficult to determine whether the target group has been mainly reached or if the video’s progress has been impeded by the fierce critical and spontaneous reactions of not only humanitarian professionals and academic circles, but also of another part of the “Y generation” via videos, posts, tweets and comments on various websites questioning the NGO’s credibility and scrutinizing its financial reports.[18]

Whatever the reason, this video sets a precedent. It successfully materialises an ongoing reflection in humanitarian circles about the terrific efficiency of viral mobilisation. This humanitarianism 2.0 bypasses UN, governmental and media agendas to impose its own advocacy temporality.[19] Among the 100 million viewers, the most attentive have certainly been non-profit and fund-raising organisations. Kony 2012 has become a textbook case the humanitarian is already learning from,[20] a standard according to which we’ll gauge the success of an advocacy campaign. “People are tantalized by the potential it suggests. Over the past week, the campaign has been a hot topic among nonprofit leaders,” comments Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of Amnesty International-USA. “Over years, we’ve reached this scale. But not on a single issue or a single action or playing a single video.”[21] So from now on, there is no doubt that non-profit organisations will strive to meet the “Kony 2012” benchmark, provided that they assume the controversies that will come with it.[22]