17 In Defense of “Slacktivism”: How KONY 2012 Got the Whole World to Watch 1 Christopher Boulton In March of 2012, the Internet video KONY 2012 swept across Facebook and Twitter racking up more than 100 million views in just six days, 2 making it the most viral video in the history of the Internet. 3 KONY 2012’s stated intent was to draw attention to how Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducts, abuses, and forces children to fight as soldiers in and around Uganda and to inspire young activists to pressure celebrities and politicians to do whatever it takes to catch him. 4 The backlash was swift. Critics objected not only to the facts, foreign policy agenda, and racial politics of KONY 2012 but also to the financial priorities of Invisible Children (IC), the organization behind the campaign. 5 Many of these objections were well-founded. IC's video oversimplified and exaggerated Kony’s power (comparing Kony to Hitler when Kony's “army” only had a few hundred soldiers), called for a United States–led military intervention into an oil-rich country (sound familiar?), and cast young, mostly white teenagers as Africa’s saviors (a neocolonial “White Man's Burden”). 6 IC also came under scrutiny for spending more money on making and showing movies than actually distributing direct aid to the affected region. 7 Other critics, while sympathetic to the cause, questioned the entire approach of the KONY 2012 campaign, dismissing the sharing of a video on social media as the epitome of “slacktivism,” 8 a term combining the lazy connotations of “slacker” with “activist” to convey how the Internet makes political expression more convenient or, as Snopes founder Barbara Mikkelson first put it to the New York Times back in 2002, “the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair.” 9 True, KONY 2012 made mistakes—and some of them ugly—but it also achieved something that is both difficult and important; by turning suburban teens into slacktivists, KONY 2012 made human rights “cool.” 10 A3781C_Coombs_Vol-1.indd 321 A3781C_Coombs_Vol-1.indd 321 18/08/15 1:46 PM 18/08/15 1:46 PM