Kony 2012

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2012 · YouTube and Vimeo, spread mainly through Facebook and Twitter · Also known as #Kony2012; #StopKony; Stop Kony; Make Kony Famous; Cover the Night

What it is

Kony 2012 was a 30-minute film made by an American charity, Invisible Children, and put on YouTube and Vimeo, websites where anyone could upload and watch videos, in March 2012. It asked viewers to make Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, an armed group that kidnapped children in central Africa and made them fight, so famous that governments would be pushed to catch him that year. It ended by asking people to buy a kit of posters and bracelets and paste the posters up.

Where it came from

Invisible Children had been showing films about the Lord's Resistance Army in American schools and churches since the mid-2000s, so it already had a young following. Jason Russell, a co-founder, directed this one and put his small son in it. Released on 5 March 2012, it spread mainly on Facebook and Twitter, where people passed links to their friends, helped along by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Justin Bieber and Rihanna. It reportedly passed 100 million views in about a week, and the charity's website crashed under the traffic.

How people used it

Mostly, people shared it. Posting the link with a line like "everyone needs to watch this" was the main action, and the film itself said that sharing was the point. Some bought the action kit of posters, a bracelet and badges, or changed their profile pictures to the campaign logo. On 20 April came Cover the Night, when supporters were meant to cover their towns in posters overnight. Very few did. Within days of release, other people were posting criticism instead: about the charity's spending, about the film simplifying a long war, and about Kony having left Uganda years earlier.

Why it mattered

For many people it was the first time they watched a charity video reach most of their friends in a few days, and then watched the attention vanish just as fast. The backlash, Jason Russell's public breakdown in San Diego ten days after release, the empty streets on Cover the Night and a sequel few watched turned it into the standard example of slacktivism: clicking share and feeling you've done your bit. Kony was never caught. "Kony 2012" became shorthand for any online cause that is loud for a week and then forgotten.

The jokes around it

• "Make Kony famous", the campaign's own slogan, later quoted back at it.
• "Did they ever catch Kony?", asked years later, usually as the punchline.
• "Remember Kony 2012?", the stock line for a craze everyone dropped at once.
• "This is the Kony 2012 of ___", said of any viral cause expected to fade fast.
• Stop Kony bracelets and T-shirts, later worn or posted ironically.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Kony 2012 shows that sharing a video felt like taking part, and for most people that's where taking part stopped. The same crowd that spread the film in a week was spreading the takedowns of it a few days later.

What noah is not sure of

The figure of 100 million views in about a week combines several sites and is widely repeated but hard to check. The timing of Invisible Children winding down its US operations (around 2014 to 2015) and Kony still being at large are from memory, not from the specimen text.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.