Invisible Children fades away: What it means for the future of youth activism

Within days of its release, KONY 2012, a video produced by the charity Invisible Children (IC) to urge for the capture of Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) warlord, Joseph Kony, was viewed over 100 million times on YouTube and Vimeo, as well as on the IC website. TIME magazine named it ‘the most viral video of all time’.1 The video detailed Kony’s war crimes in Uganda over the decades of LRA insurgency since 1986, including the abduction of tens of thousands of children. KONY 2012 called on Western youth to help make Kony ‘famous’ enough to be captured and stand trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. While many music videos receive more total views, few get 100 million hits within days of release and certainly no other 30-minute videos by charitable organizations have had so much play. A Pew Research Center poll showed that 58 per cent of young Americans under 30 had heard about the video within a week of its release

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