By early 2012, much of the world had never heard of Joseph Kony, a Central African warlord who, according to the UNICEF census, is responsible for kidnapping tens of thousands of children for enslavement and use as soldiers, and for displacing more than 2.5 million children. people across the region.
But that would change on March 5. Jason Russell, a founder of the non-profit organization Invisible Children, had directed a movie called “Kony 2012” that aimed to expose a violent crisis.
“We had a feeling that if people in the western world were aware of this atrocity it would stop in a matter of days,” said Mr Russell, 43, in a telephone interview.
In the video, released on YouTube by Invisible Children, Mr. Russell explains the conflict in simple terms appropriate for his 5-year-old son, Gavin, who appears in the video alongside inspiring images of defiant Ugandan children and activists in North America. At the end, Mr. Russell’s call to action: for celebrities, policymakers, and anyone else watching to make Joseph Kony a household name.
When Oprah Winfrey tweeted “Kony 2012,” opinions rose from 66,000 to nine million, according to Gilad Lotan, a data scientist who made a visual analysis of its distribution. Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Kim Kardashian also shared it. Within a week, the video had reached 100 million – a record on YouTube at the time – and Kony had become the target of a worldwide manhunt for civilians.
Ten years later, Mr. Kony is still at large, Gavin has graduated high school and Mr. Russell is still grappling with the mixed legacy of ‘Kony 2012’. At a time when a constant stream of videos on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter illustrates the real-time destruction of Ukrainian cities by Russian forces, the film reads both as a remnant of what experts have described as a techno-optimistic post-Arab Spring digital landscape and a precursor to an era of seemingly endless images of violence and conflict on social media.
Founded in 2004 by Mr. Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, Invisible Children had shown films about Mr. Kony and his rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, at events across the country, drawing a total of five million viewers, according to Mr. Russell. “Kony 2012,” he said, “was the first time we aggressively went after social media.”
In his analysis of the video’s distribution, Mr. Lotan, the data scientist, noted dense clusters of activity in Dayton, Ohio, and Birmingham, Ala., two cities where Invisible Children had stopped on tour.
The distribution of the film on the Internet exposed the organization to all kinds of criticism. People argued online about the film’s racial politics, the ethics of humanism, and the usefulness of “slacktivism,” comparing likes and shares to action.
“The main criticism I’ve read over the years has been the oversimplification of a complex issue,” said Mr Russell. “To that I’d say, ‘I hear you, but to make something go viral’ – our goal was to simplify a complex issue – ‘that’s what you need to do.’ In a way it’s meant as a criticism, but I took it as a compliment.”
At the time, the attention the film received became overwhelming for Mr. Russell, who was filmed walking around his neighborhood naked and screaming obscenities just over a week after release. “There are very few examples of people who have been publicly disgraced and placed under that red-hot light without some form of collapse,” he said.
The footage was sold to TMZ, according to Mr. Russell, and #Horny2012 overtook #Kony2012 in trending hashtags on Twitter as inaccurate reports surfaced that he had masturbated in public. What started as a serious effort to raise awareness had turned into a meme.
But the film clearly struck a chord with viewers, tapping into what Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and the author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” calls STEPPS: Social Currency, Triggers, emotion, public utility and story. These factors appeal to our psychological makeup and basic human motivations, said Professor Berger.
Eric Meyerson, the former head of affiliate marketing at YouTube, said “Kony 2012” leaned on the emotional qualities of the most resonating videos on the web at the time. The first three minutes contain images of the Arab Spring and a child riding his bicycle for the first time.
“It was the videos that we were trying to promote at YouTube at the time, to submit to Webbys, the kind of videos that would stir good feelings, bring people back to a platform,” said Mr. Meyerson. He added that in some cases, viewers felt that by consuming and sharing content, they “helped change the world.”
When Mr. Meyerson joined Facebook in 2015 to lead the video marketing team, that genuine sense of possibility continued. But after the introduction of Facebook Live in August, the mood changed when graphical live-streamed images began to appear.
“Then we had the rise of fake news, Brexit, the election of Trump,” he said, “and suddenly, towards the end of 2016, it went from ‘social media can change the world for the better’ to ‘Facebook and YouTube and Twitter destroy democracy.’” The conversations that soon followed focused on algorithms, echo chambers, and post-truth politics.
“The early 2010s were incredibly pivotal in changing our current information environment, and it’s not getting the attention it deserves,” said Mr. Meyerson.
Now, the earliest images of conflict and crisis often come to us through social media and are informed by the platforms where they are shared. “The advent of digital war has challenged mainstream media and other elite actors in their ability to shape what war looks like,” said Andrew Hoskins, an interdisciplinary research professor at the University of Glasgow.
“Looking at Twitter right now is very interesting,” he said, referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been dubbed the first TikTok war. The sheer amount of “images flooding our consciousness of conflict,” he said — open source intelligence, citizen journalism on TikTok — “could revolutionize war, but it might make no difference at all.”
In 2017, the United States and Uganda scaled back a mission to capture Mr Kony, declaring that he no longer posed a regional threat. “Atrocities committed by the LRA have been reduced by 80 percent,” Samuel Enosa Peni, the archbishop of the western state of Equatoria, wrote in an email. (He has lost three siblings to the military.)
Today Invisible Children focuses entirely on local programs in Central Africa. Social media plays a minor role in its strategy.
mr. Russell also called back his digital presence. “While we now have the media literacy to disprove things like QAnon theories,” he said, “I can’t help but think the Internet still kind of triggers me.”