Yesterday I, like many of you probably did, woke up to find my Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook feeds filled with the word “Kony.” The hashtags “#kony” “#kony2012″ and “#stopkony” were suddenly EVERYWHERE. “What the hell is this all about?”, I wondered. As I went through my various feeds I found myself implored to stop whatever I was doing to watch a 30-minute video about a Ugandan warlord that had gone viral — like 26 million views in just a couple of days viral. My next thought was “how the hell do all these people have time to watch a 30-minute video on a Ugandan warlord during the day?” I mean, I work on the internet, and I certainly don’t have time to watch a video that long. (Trim that sh*t down to five minutes, yo.)
Anyway, the video on Joseph Kony, looter, raper, user of child soldiers (typical African warlord stuff), went viral and many of the goodhearted people on the internet, as they are wont to do, blindly latched on to the cause and started drumming up support for Invisible Children, the group behind the video.
But the problem with Invisible Children is that it consists entirely of three dudebro filmmakers whose financials are all kinds of shady (Why does a non-profit need a bank account in the Cayman Islands?) — it’s not a stretch to, upon closer inspection, form the opinion that the three are pompous twats using the charity to fund a lavish, globetrotting lifestyle.
I think Johnny Internets over at the Daily What summed it all up rather well…
The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.
Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.
By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million)
Bottom line: Kony is an evil man but there are other organizations who you should give your money to if you feel compelled to aid humanity. Few people on the internet today are disputing that.
Oh, BTW, here’s the aforementioned 30-minute video that’s burning up the internet (I still haven’t watched the whole thing as I can barely even stomach the avalanche of smugness in the video’s first couple of minutes)…
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/41/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2012/03/Picture-172-150x150.png)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2012/03/Picture-171-150x150.png)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2012/03/tumblr_m0zybtKMZm1qhcd6po1_r1_500-150x150.gif)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2012/03/Picture-37-150x150.png)
I saw people plugging this while playing BF3 last night. Crazy stuff
Bless you. What is so hard about doing a simple google search before you start flooding everyone with propaganda? I get the high school kids, I guess, because they are all idiots, but everyone else? C’mon…
nice article. I completely agree.
Im all for stopping evil african warlords but i wasnt really buying into the smugness of the bleeding heart camera man, either.
He didnt sell me on the idea of stopping a huge problem by “making kony famous”.It just sounds like an irritating way to evangelize and say “look at me! I care about sad things and like, issues n’ stuff!”
And after Kony, then what? The problem didnt start or will end with kony. There are other warloards all over africa doing the same types of heinous shit. They made it look like stopping kony will end all of africa’s problems.
Im not saying dont do anything but this campaign itself feels more like “lets pump our fists and feel good about ourselves!” and less “let’s try to really solve this problem”
And the whirlwind of controversy surrounding the organization isnt helping either. I think i’ll stick to unicef for helping kids.
And yes i know this is worthy of a tl;dr stamp.
And the video couldve done without the guy’s kid. Yes he’s cute but you picked a helluva time to start bragging about how fucking cute your kid is
Little story: My nephew liked watching space jam the movie as a toddler and because we lived in the ‘burbs, the few times he came accross a black man he’d point and say “Michael Jordan!”. I really hope the kid dont associate black people with “evil african warlord”
So my understanding is…
They set out to make kony famous so the world was more aware of the wrong doings by kony and the LRA…
So the governments around the world would have their hands fouced to do more about the issue at hand.
Hasn’t this campaign done exactly that, they may not use all their funds in a transparent manor…But they started this 9years ago and wanted to help, even if only 30% of 8million (dont quote me, typing on phone and couldnt be bothered to reference) that they have raised to help with the isue is geting to the ground in africa, its more than I myself have done.
Note; You should really watch the whole video… It does explain alot about what the goal is.
Most charities are this same way. They use most of their funds to continue their own existence. Also, being a “non-profit” is basically a meaningless tax shelter an idea, which has been abused by scoundrels for decades. You can still pay a CEO millions per year in salary, and be a “non-profit”.
Ya know who’s far worse than these guys – every religion/church in the world, who use tax free status to build war chests, then use them to cheat, lie, and influence governments. I wonder if the Pope could show that 30% of what catholic churches collect in donations goes to help anyone. – sorry about the soapbox side-rant, but I’ve had enough of all these fucks, and they are basically all the same.
Amen.
Also, they lost credibility with this video in the first ten seconds, when they chose not to credit the opening quote.
The use of typed words with highlighter over them, in an effort to give your words credibility??!?!? really, I can do that. Let me go ahead and print out a piece of paper that says Invisible Children rape african goats and then highlight it. I guess that would make it true, and “obvious that it needs to be stopped.”
Why don’t we teach Logic in america anymore. The American people have no aptitude for critical thinking anymore. Just look at a political discourse for proof.
I actually went to a presentation of this the other day. During the Q&A I asked “If one of the goals of this campaign is to continue to have the US military train the Ugandan military on how to capture him (bad idea, considering that the Ugandan dictatorship is guilty of many of the same crimes that Kona is accused of), but he is now longer in Uganda, are you encouraging the Ugandan military to perform operations outside of their borders?”
Yeah, they didn’t have a good answer for that.
Six years of relative peace in Uganda seems to have unhinged the internet. Thank heavens I don’t live in either place.