POLL: Is Invisible Children's 'Kony 2012' Video Benefiting Anyone?
Over the past week anyone who has been online has probably felt bombarded by friends asking them to "spare 30 minutes to watch this amazing video," but we want to know, do you think the charity Invisible Children accomplishes what it set out to do?
Uganda is probably a country many people don't hear a lot about and think about even less. The country on the other side of the world has a population of around 32 million, lower than that of California.
This week, however, Uganda, and more importantly Joseph Kony, have been the talk of the town. For days now, one can barely scroll a few inches down their Facebook feed without seeing mention of the two.
The nonprofit organization Invisible Children released a 30-minute video showing a view of a war in Uganda that is being waged by the Lord's Resistance Army.
According to the video the LRA is taking children from the rural villages and making the girls sex-slaves while the boys are trained to be child soldiers.
"Critics have said the video glosses over a complicated history that made it possible for Kony to rise to the notoriety he has today. They also lamented that the video does not inform viewers that Kony originally was waging war against Uganda's army, whose human rights record has been condemned as brutal by independent observers," an article on Boston.com said.
As of Friday afternoon the video had nearly 60 million views on YouTube and has been passed around all of the major social media networks, but we want to know: Do you think the video will help solve the problems in the central African nation?
Many of experts don't, but we want to hear from you in the comments.
Damon Michaels
12:23 pm on Tuesday, March 13, 2012
I fail to see how this could hurt charitable efforts. The job of the organization is to publicize and try to find ways to help. Go to http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=12429 to see how this organization spends the money that is donated to it.
Publicizing things that are going wrong will always have some kind of impact. Whether it is for the better depends on the groups and individuals on the ground who make the real impact.
Josh Gray
1:07 pm on Tuesday, March 13, 2012
I think that a lot of people feel the attention on Kony and Invisible Children is taking focus away from the "real" threat, which many consider to be the Ugandan government itself. There was an interesting article in Foreign Policy magazine after the video came out: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/07/guest_post_joseph_kony_is_not_in_uganda_and_other_complicated_things