10 Years On, Let’s Look Back At Kony 2012
George Clooney offered his private satellite networks to help, Angelina Jolie nearly took part in a plan to capture Kony at dinner - the story of Kony 2012 was completely wild.
Ten years ago, on March 6, a 29-minute video was uploaded to YouTube with a simple title: Kony 2012.
Back then, social media activism as we know it now was relatively new. We were years away from movements like #MeToo, #HeForShe, or the proliferation of #BlackLivesMatter.
The video, which spiralled out of control and dominated the news for weeks, marked one of, if not the first social media activism and awareness campaigns to achieve recognition on a global scale. Whether or not the campaign was successful in making tangible change is not as significant as the crazy attention it received at both a social and political level. What’s more, it very likely shaped both online activism and marketing as we know it.
So, let’s take a stroll down memory lane.
What Was Kony 2012?
The Kony 2012 campaign led by Jason Russell was established by the Invisible Children foundation. The foundation was dedicated namely to preventing children across Central Africa from living in poverty, dying prematurely, and becoming child soldiers.
From early on in their campaigns, the main antagonist was Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord who founded the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA is a fundamentalist Christian terrorist group. Operating since the late ’80s, Kony is one of Africa’s most wanted war criminals, wanted for the abduction of tens of thousands of children into the LRA over several decades.
Russell’s Invisible Children foundation had been dedicated to this cause for years before they dropped the viral video. Their prior campaigns had far less success, and it isn’t hard to see why when you watch this cringe boyband-esque song they wrote about helping child soldiers. But on March 6th, 2012, they finally got it right.
Kony 2012 is still on YouTube, currently sitting at well over 103 million views. At 29-minutes long, the video sees Russell narrate compilations of heart-wrenching footage of other viral videos, interspersed with his own footage from Uganda, testimonies from children who escaped Kony, and his own young son.
The video culminates in a call to action encouraging viewers to make Kony a household name so that the US government would send non-confrontational military support to the Ugandan groups trying to catch Kony. How would we do this? Well, you’d buy one of their “action kits” from the Invisible Children website and on April 20th, 2012 you would gather in your nearest major city to “cover the night” and stick said posters and stickers everywhere, thus making Kony a household name and getting the world one step closer to making children in the affected regions safer.
It’s difficult to articulate the chaotic fervour the Kony 2012 campaign left in its wake. In the weeks following the video’s release, many major publications labelled it a marketing scam. The Ugandan Government was quick to respond, saying the threat of the LRA was not as significant as the campaign had made it out to be.
Meanwhile, others (including my 17-year-old self) were spurred on by the fiery prospect of ending the suffering caused by Joseph Kony. All we had to do was spend a little money and put up posters, right? Well, turns out we didn’t quite manage the action part of the call-to-action.
The numbers were a flop, with a fraction of those who registered actually turning up to “cover the night.” According to the Daily Telegraph, of the 19,000 who registered on Facebook, only about 30 showed. Similar numbers were reported around the world.
The Hectic Stuff You Might Not Remember
In 2017, leaked court documents from the International Criminal Court (ICC) revealed there was a plot to use Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt as bait to catch Kony that they both were in on.
According to the Sunday Times, emails between Jolie and Luis Moreno Ocampo, ex-ICC chief prosecutor, revealed an arrangement discussed between 2011 and 2012 where Jolie and her now ex-husband would invite Kony to dinner. Seriously.
The plan was…simple. Jolie and Pitt would invite Kony to dine with them, he would agree, and at some point during dinner would be arrested by and detained by U.S. Special Forces soldiers. Ocampo wrote to Jolie, “Apparently you can be embedded with the special forces that are chasing Kony. Can Brad go with you?” To which Jolie replied, “Brad is being supportive. Let’s discuss logistics. Much love Xxx.”
Needless to say, the plan was not followed through. In fact, Jolie appears to have ghosted Ocampo in late 2012. Allegedly, he wrote, “Dear Angie, I hope you are well. I miss you” with no reply. Look, we’ve all been there.
Angelina Jolie wasn’t the only celebrity caught up with Kony fever. George Clooney also offered his private satellite network, a perfectly normal thing to own, to military forces working to catch Kony. Specifically to share the data collected by his satellites on troop movements with special forces to predict Kony’s movements.
As for the figure at the heart of it all? Sadly, Jason Russell suffered a handful of public mental breakdowns that saw him withdraw as the face of Invisible Children.
So, Did It Work?
Well, It depends on your point of view. Was Kony caught, killed, or brought to justice? No. As of the time of writing, Kony remains at large and wanted by the ICC. Intel alleges Kony has relocated both himself and the LRA to Central African terrain where he continues to commit atrocious crimes against children despite his ailing health.
George Clooney also offered his private satellite network to military forces working to catch Kony.
If Invisible Children’s goal was solely to catch Kony then by all measures, the Kony 2012 campaign is a failure. However, their goal wasn’t necessarily to catch Kony. The goal, as stated in the original video, was to make his crimes famous enough for people to advocate for his capture. It’s safe to say that Invisible Children succeeded on the making-him-famous front.
Since the Obama administration, US presidential administrations continue to support the ICC’s operations to catch war criminals. More recently, on the 6th of December 2021, the US embassy offered a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Joseph Kony.
What about Invisible Children? Despite the turnout for the “paint the night” event being relatively abysmal, and a rumoured shutdown, Invisible Children put the vast sums of money they made from the campaign to good use. The foundation funded more schools and radio communication programs in active LRA areas of Central Africa. They continue to operate today under new leadership with the goal of improving the lives of children in war-torn African territories.
The Bigger Cultural Impact
One thing you may recall about the Kony 2012 campaign was how polarising it all was. Many publications and outlets — hell, even South Park — slandered the campaign as “slacktivism” outright. They were critical of Invisible Children’s oversimplified, emotive take on what was and remains a complex humanitarian issue. Believe it or not, people deemed the video anti-feminist too because it stole the limelight from International Women’s Day.
Jason Russell’s mental health struggles were also used to discredit the movement. Videos published by TMZ of his public breakdowns were viewed as indictments of the campaign’s authenticity, despite many of the movement’s supporters coming to his defence.
Another critique levelled at the campaign, both then and now, is the campaign’s appeal to white saviourism and justification of American military intervention in African nations. Kony 2012 is far from the first or last humanitarian campaign to use the harrowing stories and images of Black children to fundraise, but it is a nevertheless questionable strategy that carries with it the bigoted notion that African nations are populated with suffering Black people who can only be saved by charitable white Westerners.
[It] carries with it the bigoted notion that African nations are populated with suffering Black peoples who can only be saved by charitable white Westerners.
All of this discourse, for better and worse, kept Kony 2012 in the public eye. It wasn’t just the quality or virality of the video, but the emotionally-driven discourse around it that made Kony and Invisible Children household names. Regardless of how people felt about the foundation’s marketing, it was nevertheless undeniably successful in infiltrating popular culture.
This marketing technique, one of releasing an emotionally-driven short film to drive product interest is now a technique we see all the time. But the Kony 2012 campaign was one of, if not the first ultra-successful version of it. Think of how many emotional Dove beauty campaigns rail against fat-phobia, the Gillette razor short films that advocated for men to step up against misogyny, the NIKE advertisement that used Colin Kaepernick and the issue of racism in sports: each of these inspired tumultuous public discourse. And that discourse is as much part of the campaign as the campaign itself.
Whether intentional or not, Kony 2012 likely shaped advertising over the past decade, as much as it shaped popular views of online activism. It was the first time in most of our lives that the lines between activism, advertising and the virality of social media became blurred. And they’ve only become more melded as time goes on.
Perhaps the most obvious lesson the Kony 2012 campaign can teach us is that real social change isn’t just a click away. But it is one hell of a marketing technique when you get it right.
Merryana Salem (they/them) is a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster on most social media as @akajustmerry.