experiences took everyone back to the moment when the initial excitement about Kony 2012’s phenomenal spread gave way to the backlash against Russell, Invisible Children, and the group’s young supporters. In Move, a film IC released in the fall of 2012, IC communication director Noelle West described her experience:
My cloud nine quickly dissolved.… Our website wasn’t built to maintain 35,000 concurrent viewers at one time. So our website’s crashing intermittently. The only thing we could communicate through was Tumblr. So you’re not going to see information about every single thing that we do from a Tumblr. And that was, I think, the beginning of the conversation turn from “this was the greatest thing on the planet” to “what the hell is this?”
In the same film, Russell described the criticism as a “tsunami” that IC “didn’t see coming.” In his words, “We turned around, and we were all under water.”
Something of the vicious tone of the critiques is captured in comments from Ugandan activist, social media strategist, and blogger TMS Ruge (2012a), who defined Kony 2012 as “another travesty in shepherd’s clothing befalling my country and my continent.” To Ruge, the film was “so devoid of nuance, utility and respect for agency that it is appallingly hard to contextualize.” Ruge, along with other critics, also questioned the effectiveness of purchasing “a T-shirt and bracelet” as acts that would somehow end a two-decade-long conflict. Other critics accused IC of exploiting the naiveté and ignorance of its young supporters, who they feared would confuse the feel-good process of spreading a YouTube video with the hard work involved in changing a complex international situation.
One internet meme summed up the phenomenon: “Watch 30 Minute Video on Internet, Become Social Activist.” This meme is, in many ways, emblematic of a larger critique of so-called clicktivism, defined as the application of the metrics and methods of the marketplace (number of clicks) to measure the success of (arguably) activist efforts. As one critic explains, “The end result is the degradation of activism into a series of petition drives that capitalise on current events. Political engagement becomes a matter of clicking a few links. In promoting the illusion that surfing the web can change the world, clicktivism is to activism as McDonald’s is to a slow-cooked meal. It may look like food, but the life-giving nutrients are long gone” (White 2010). The clicktivist critique often describes online campaigns as involving limited risk or exertion and having limited impact on institutional politics.
A meme that critiqued and ridiculed the Kony 2012 campaign.
The New York Times’ Room for Debate introduced its discussion of Kony 2012, tellingly titled “Fight War Crimes, without Leaving the Couch?” (2012), with this provocation: “Social media definitely have the power to bring attention to terrible problems—but is there a downside, if the ‘call to action’ is wrong-headed or if these campaigns give young people a false sense of what it really takes to create change?” While networked communications has made it easier for citizens to access and act upon information, making it possible for movements like Kony 2012 to achieve remarkable speed and scope, we must keep in mind these developments have not always been seen as a positive thing.
Indeed, the most persistent skepticism centers around whether these new platforms and practices make it too easy to take action without ensuring that people have time to reflect. Writing in the midst of the boom and bust surrounding the video, Mark A. Drumbl (2012) concluded: “The Kony 2012 campaign—and clicktivism generally—have short attention spans and limited shelf life” (484). Some speak about compassion fatigue in a world where political messages get carried by dramatic and simplified videos and then diminish as participants feel the tug of yet another story and another appeal for action. The premise that IC’s supporters could achieve dramatic results by mobilizing massive numbers of people online was resoundingly ridiculed by memes, ironically generated and circulated by other internet users, such as one that announced, “You shared Kony 2012? Congratulations—you saved Africa.” Malcom Gladwell’s (2010) critique that Twitter revolutions involved lower risks than previous political movements was expressed by another widely circulated cartoon depicting an exchange between activists of two different generations. The older one, wearing an eye patch, explains, “I lost my eye in a five day student protest in 1970,” while the younger one explains, “I just sprained my clicking finger joining a Facebook protest group.”
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Kjerstin Thorson (forthcoming) identified and tracked 135 such memes circulated in response to the Kony 2012 campaign, almost all of which were negative in their characterization of IC and its efforts. They saw such memes as part of a struggle over what constitutes good citizenship, with the memes mostly referring back to classic conceptions of the informed citizen some felt were under threat from Kony 2012’s more networked model of participation. Michael Schudson (1999) and Roger Hurwitz (2004) have discussed a shift from the older model of the informed citizen toward an emerging model of the monitorial citizen. Under the informed citizen model, people need to possess full knowledge of an issue before they can act politically. Given the complexity of many contemporary issues, this standard is often impossible to achieve and the failure to meet expectations based on it can result in a sense of disempowerment. By contrast, in a networked society, people can monitor specific concerns and then use social media to alert each other to issues requiring greater attention or collective action. We can see the circulation of these political videos as one mechanism through which monitorial citizenship works. Kligler-Vilenchik and Thorson conclude that the anti–Kony 2012 memes “may suppress budding political interest and engagement” by dismissing both a political cause that engaged many young people and ridiculing the forms of political participation they chose to make their voices heard: “young networked citizens may be experimenting with new ways not only to become informed, but to act on that information.”
A meme created by Peter Ajtai of insert-joke-here.com pitted generations against each other in the slacktivism debate.
If all that happens is the spread of a video, then the system of monitorial citizenship will have failed. However, our research shows that this is not what happened with Kony 2012, nor was it what IC intended when it released the film. On the contrary, IC saw such circulations as a point of entry into more intense kinds of political engagement. A high percentage of those reached by such social awareness campaigns may well shift their attention elsewhere, but some research (Andresen 2011) suggests that the act of passing along a video increases the likelihood that participants will take other kinds of action in support of the cause, including contributing time and money. A large part of IC’s argument for “making Kony famous” was that, for many years, his atrocities received relatively little media coverage and escaped intense scrutiny from the international community. The group hoped that increased awareness would result in shifts in media coverage and public policy that would hinder the LRA’s mobility.
Echoing this, the IC supporters we interviewed post–Kony 2012 made very realistic claims about the effectiveness of online advocacy campaigns. Nineteen-year-old Johnny discussed writing a class essay critiquing Gladwell’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” He explained his perspective: “[Facebook and Twitter] definitely can be used as a medium to gather people, to get attention, but it can’t be the only thing. At the end of the day, you need bills to be passed. You need money to be raised, but if that [social media] can be used to spread awareness and get the word out and help these things be achieved, that’s great. Kony 2012 proved that.” Johnny described the video as a catalyst setting other things into motion, creating the awareness and support that enabled Congress to pass laws impacting what was happening in Africa. In his model, participatory and institutionalized politics worked together to achieve the desired results.
IC offered its members varying degrees of participation, including involvement in large-scale mass gatherings and attendance at training sessions, while it also worked more directly with elite institutions and political power brokers. In fact, many of the supporters we met saw the range of participation IC offered and the “hip” tone of these engagements as crucial