CO12041 | Kony 2012: Potentials and pitfalls of social media

An article in Foreign Affairs magazine noted that the group (among others): “have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasising the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony – a brutal man, to be sure – as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” A large part of the criticism stems from their support for the US AFRICOM mission in Uganda, assisting in military operations in the DRC and CAR to stop the LRA.

The questions against the group’s finances (caused by their enormously successful fundraising model) are unlikely to fatally undermine their organization. For all the accusations that their resources are thinly used on the ground in Uganda, DRC or CAR, the technical critiques of non-profit finance are unlikely to have staying power.

Social media and objectivity

However, the real damage may be in their messaging. As media professionals, they wanted to tell an effective story. To do so, they narrowed the “bad guy” to a singular figure of evil, Joseph Kony, comparing him to Hitler and other notorious killers of history. That simple message was effective: Celebrities such as Rihanna and Justin Bieber tweeted to ask their followers to spread the word. But in depicting a simple story with celebrity-like focus on a single person, Invisible Children grossly over-exaggerated Kony’s impact, and largely relied on footage of children suffering from before 2005 because that had the most dramatic impact.

The LRA today is a small force comprising several hundred soldiers and non-combatant porters, sex-slaves and children. It operates in a region nearly the size of France, but is only one of a large number of militia groups that have taken advantage of the general lawlessness in CAR and DRC to exploit the rich mineral wealth in the area through violent means. In this context, Kony is a smaller player in a vastly more complex and volatile region than the attention to him warrants.

Root Causes

It follows too, that stopping Kony is unlikely to solve the roots of the problem – the region will remain unstable with or without him. Kony’s right-hand man, Vincent Otti, was killed (by Kony himself, allegedly) years ago, and several others have surrendered, but that did little to stop the group’s renewal of violence after peace talks stalled in 2008. Furthermore, Invisible Children want Kony arrested by Ugandan and US forces and then tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC), something that is unlikely to happen given the Ugandan government’s antagonism towards the ICC and the US’ lack of accession to the Rome Statute of the ICC.

For those of us who have worked in northern Uganda, there is sympathy and indeed some admiration, for the efforts and ideals of Invisible Children. But there is much more apprehension about the way they understand the conflict, the solutions they are seeking, and their omission of other organisations doing immensely important work on the conflict. Unfortunately, considerable amounts of the buzz they created are about their organisation itself. It is an instructive lesson about the potential and pitfalls of social media today.

About the Author

Joel Ng is an associate research fellow at the Centre for Multilateralism Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University. He worked on civilian protection issues in northern Uganda from 2005–2007 during a peak in the LRA’s operations in the country.