Facebook's viral activism is really good... for admen Normally I hang out on Facebook for casual conversation with friends and family. But not last night. Last night I settled down to browse Facebook to discover that Kony 2012 had overrun Facebook, turning it into a maelstrom of "Watch this now!" and subsequent feelings of having done something noble. One minute they were LOL'ing …
I find this Facebook activism very disturbing.
You have the ones that start going on about how many soldiers died whenever a celebrity dies, and how disgusting it is, and the ones that go on about how much soldiers get paid whenever a footballer hits the headlines (the sentiments on those are right, but the "You'll either repost/like this, or you're against our soldiers" attitude isn't..
You've got the ones that start posting things about immigration whenever some racial tension hits the headlines
You've got the ones that repost all the hatefilled, emotional stuff about child abuse whenever that comes to the forefront. And the animal cruelty ones too.
None of it helps anyone, but I often feel that the people posting it come off as smug, aggressive and display an attitude of "you're with us or against us"... which I really don't like.
Anonymous, cause I don't want to be accused of being "against them".
:-) I spent the first few hours totally annoyed that I couldn't weed the Stop Kony! posts out of my news stream fast enough. But it was only later that I realized what a powerful lesson it was in how to coordinate a social media campaign.
Which isn't to say that these are any more likable, even if effective.
I personally feel that the way to do social media is through nuanced conversation, not hitting people over the head with a blunt message. But maybe that's why I'm not the one with millions of Stop Kony! views....
Agreed.
There may be some noble sentiments behind some of them but mostly it amounts to emotional blackmail chain-spam. Basically the "if you don't repost this you're a heartless *****" in just the same vein as the old "if you don't send this letter to 20 of your friends your family will die"
There's also so much of this now that the really genuine ones that *may* be worthwhile or do some good get lost in the noise...
AC for much the same reason as above :)
you will die at midnight if you don't water the cantaloupe harvest.
this is real its writen by a ghost and did i mention the ghost came
from a girl who died. you will be haunted by a real professional
post this to all of the people and i will spare your cantaloupe
harvest this time but i promise you will be haunted severely bad
Given he's been around doing this for 20 years the Project Kony dribble on Facebook is one of the best examples of the web 2.0 Echo/Ego-chamber in action. Cue the "celebrities" adding their 2 cents - if they actually gave a fuck they'd take a note of current affairs and get their heads out of their own arses long enough to actually make a difference. All credit to celebrities that do actually make a genuine and heartfelt effort rather than stepping onto the latest bandwagon.
But I'm not donating to Invisible Children.
I shared it because sure this has been going on for years and there are questions about the charity, but it's the first time I've seen a name/face put to these crimes.
The very fact this guy is getting a light shined upon him may make him a vigilante target on whichever beach or resort he's probably kicking back on right now. That in turn might make others like him think twice.
And regardless of the legitimacy of this charity, we all agree that this is happening - therefore it's a rather cynical to say, well ignore the cause they're going on about, but learn something for your next marketing campaign...
Imagine if Google tried to run with "Look at these poor Foxconn workers who are employed by Apple... download Google Play today!" That's essentially what the article is saying.
Millions of Likes, and only $20k raised. Oh go f%ck off. Truly. Each person cares enough to click Like but not enough to give more than an average of a penny per person? Not even a tenth of a penny. Good Lord, not even a hundreth of a penny with 10 million Likes. That's the ultimate hypocrisy. Sort of like, "OMG, like, I *totally* care...but not enough to give less than the value of the extra napkin that I will throw away."
Fuck me sideways, Matt produces an article that isn't bullshit! He then very annoyingly point out how a charity (there are many of them doing the same shit, WWF springs to mind) spends most of it's income looking after itself and very little on being a charity.
I was fully expecting to come here, read some ill thought piece of rambling rubbish and blame myself for giving "Open ... and Shut" one last try. Now I can't do that :(
I almost feel like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes.
Nothing new here. The tabloid press has been doing it for decades:
1: Politician, newspaper proprietor & arms dealer decide over a round of golf what they want to happen [let's say "invade the Isle of Man" for the LOLz]
2: Proprietor begins sensationalist campaign in that part of the media aimed at the 'hard of thinking'; "Manx government to make paedophilia compulsory!", "Isle of Man developing weapons of mass destruction!", "Incubator destroying computer virus linked to Manx IP addresses!"... etc. etc.
3: Hard-of-thinking readership drag themselves away from Celebrity X-Brother on Ice long enough to form opinions; "It's bleedin' ridiculous, innit! Them fuckin' Manxes is killin' babies and goin to put nuclear bombs on FaceBook! It's diss-gus-tink!"
4: hard-of-thinking demand 'gummint' take action
5: Politician condemns Manx regime and calls on them to come to the negotiating table whilst claiming we don't want to interfere in their "internal affairs"
6: If $amount_of_people_outraged < $majority_of_braindead_electorate then $press_hysteria++ goto 2 else:
7: Politician makes hand-wringing, onion-in-hankie speech, regretting that Manx government's intransigence has left the "free world" with no other options.
8: Buy more shares in arms dealing friend's company "Slaughterignia Solutions"
9: War
10: Profit
11: Trebles all round!
...And the really great thing is, you can repeat this procedure every five years or so, 'ad infinitum' and never get caught out, because you're only giving 'the people' what they've been clamouring for
whats happening in africa is tribalism gone horribly wrong. People like kony are a lot like politicians they will represent a paricular interest group in this case a particular tribe. You have to understand children are kidnapped not cause they are children but because they are children of the opposing tribe. In these kind of situations its usually multiple warlords all representing their own tribes that fight for control. If kony dies the tribe that he supports will be butchered and enslaved as revenge. We saw this happen a while back in libya and recently in kenya. This is mordern day shaka zulu only in the old days they used spears and bow arrow now a days its machetis and ak47. The best way to solve this confict is stop the god damn arms trade, there is a reason these wars continue cause someone is peofitting from it.
Ever since I deliberately ran a pipe from this huge tanker marked "International Effluent Supplies" into my house, I'm finding it really difficult to interact with my family and friends like I used to, as every room is filling up with foul smelling sludge.
Oh noes! Why won't somebody fix it for me?
My niece falls in that teenage/young adult demographic being targeted by the video, but she has also been to Uganda doing voluntary work this past year. It is interesting and heartening to see her speaking out and urging her friends to do some simple research, rather than just having a knee-jerk like-and-repost reaction. Her admonishment that "Google is your friend!" carries its own baggage, I grant you, but then again hers is also a message well-targeted to her fellow teenagers: if you're going to be lazy and get your information from the internet, at least try to get multiple sources.
Why won't any Journalist state the patently obvious about this "Kony2012" viral marketing ?
This is very sophisticated domestic political propaganda targeted at the 2012 US elections.
(You'll notice a lot of Obama-esque election imagery in the video)
So think about it logically...
1. In February 2012 The US and EU threaten economic sanctions against Uganda and a withdrawal of military ties if it passes the very popular Anti-Homosexuality law (described by Barack Obama as "odious" ).
2. In March 2012 the Kony2012 viral marketing campaign starts calling for military advisors to stay in Uganda to "stop Kony" and to "save the children".
(you'll notice in the video they don't mention why US military advisors are being pulled out of Uganda)
3. Obviously if sanctions are enacted against Uganda, Obama will be seen (in an election year) as having sacrificed black children to appease the gay lobby.
"InvisibleChildren" are a front organization for Evangelical Pentecostal Christians.
It's leader Jason Russell is ... yes! you guessed it:
a fundamentalist christian, take a look at his facebook page.
Utterly brilliant tactic though,
the religious right-wingers get the useful idiots of the affluent undergraduate leftwing "elite" to create a the perfect wedge issue in Obama's 2012 election campaign.
The media (let alone teenage merkans) are so comically stupid, I'd doubt many would even know where Uganda is !.
Or the fact that Kony was wiped out 7 years ago and now lives in hiding in the Congo !
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