22 Mar 2013

Kony 2012 – the viral campaign one year later

A year ago a film about a Ugandan warlord, Kony 2012, went viral. Its director Jason Russell succeeded in making Joseph Kony famous, but subsequently struggled with his own new-found fame.

Joseph Kony in 2006 (Getty)

One year ago, Kony 2012 appeared on YouTube bringing the world’s attention to Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. As the video explained, Kony was believed to have been behind a string of atrocities in the region.

It was half an hour long, concerned a relatively obscure conflict, and was determined to prompt a response from everyone who watched it – a meme with a political message.

One week and 100 million views later, not to mention the worldwide media attention and endless speculation and reaction to the video, it could undoubtedly be said that its creator, Jason Russell, had resoundingly achieved his first goal: to “make Kony famous.”

Although little was known about Russell before that week in March 2012, his Invisible Children campaign had been active since 2004. A trip to Africa, initially to shoot a film about Darfur, had alerted Russell to the conflict in Uganda and the actions of the LRG.

A combination of activism and slick videos followed – one of which tried to get across the message of Ugandan conflict with a take on High School Musical. (As of 2013, this video has 75,000 hits.)

The huge success of Kony 2012 came as a bolt from the blue – and the media bolted towards Russell. Whether in the form of invitations to TV shows (Russell took part in 17 interviews in just two days) or through the millions of tweets and posts which either congratulated and attacked him, the sheer weight of the publicity took its emotional toll on Russell.

Ten days after the video appeared, Russell was filmed in San Diego walking naked through the streets, yelling and shouting “in an incoherent fashion”. He was referred into a psychiatric ward and treated for “exhaustion, dehydration and malnutrition”.

Russell’s erratic actions obscured the message of Kony 2012. The media seemed to draw a line under his activism. A second video, Kony 2012: Beyond Famous, attracted 1.6m views in the time it took the original to gather 112 million.

Russell himself faded from public view. In October, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he proffered an explanation for his actions, referring what he had done as “an out of body experience.”

One year on, Joseph Kony is still at large, but his name and actions have echoed throughout the world. Invisible Children is still at work, organising rallies in the hope that, some day, Kony will be found and put to justice.