Trending Tragedy

          Wherever you were June 25, 2009 it probably didn’t take long to hear about the death of Michael Jackson as the news spread around the web at lightning speed. These days it seems like people race to be the first to get breaking information out to their friends, relaying news as millions of little reporters. Besides its role in disseminating information social media is also instrumental in creating enduring trends, like helping to enter selfie into our lexicon and creating a space for posting old pictures every (throw back) Thursday. Importantly social media doesn’t just stop at such trivial things as popularizing Ellen’s tweet at the Academy Awards, but can prove to be a powerful tool informing the public and mobilizing individuals into causes.

Displacement of People Continues

          The terminus of these causes is all too familiar as they become subjected to the same laws of trends that have been bringing down people and ideas for centuries. Only now with a finite amount of space on the internet’s front page and a vicious battle being waged for attention trending ideas struggle to stay relevant and can disappear even faster than they arrived. In the mid to late 2000's the Darfur Genocide was one of the hottest topics around, as evidenced by the joint statement issued by then presidential candidates John McCain, Hilary Clinton, and Barak Obama asserting whoever was elected would pursue an end to the violence. If it is done in an election year it must be important to the voting public. Now in the middle of the next decade the violence has continued unabated and unchecked with hundreds of thousands having lost their lives or becoming internally displaced, yet where has the support from young people, politicians, and celebrities gone?

Infographic From The Guardian

         One of the first major examples of hashtag activism came during March 2012 when the non profit group Invisible Children created a 30 minute long video describing the actions of the Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony. Kony was the head of a militant group that had been terrorizing Uganda and abducting children as sex slaves and child soldiers since the 1990’s. In October 2005 the International Criminal Court announced an arrest warrant for Kony and other members of the LRA; however, it was not until 2012 that Kony and his tragic acts stormed onto the scene and into our social consciousness following a tweet from Oprah regarding the short documentary, causing views of the video online to jump 13,500%. This unprecedented rise not only led to awareness, mobilization, and action by some, including the US who a number of months later sent 100 soldiers to aid in the capture of Kony. It also put filmmaker Jason Russell in the hospital for the ‘reactive psychosis’ he experienced stemming from the instantaneous and intense pressures of social stardom.  Invisible Children released a follow up to the radically influential Kony 2012 film called ‘Beyond Famous’, which received roughly 1% of the views its predecessor garnered. Kony is still at large in central Africa.

Regional Indicators of Boko Haram Activity

         This leads us to the current trending tragedy, the abduction of over 250 Nigerian school girls by the Nigerian based Islamic group Boko Haram. The success of social media trends are often affected by the novelty of the trend. In this case the abduction of 267 young, helpless school girls was novel enough to galvanize the world. Not novel is that Boko Haram has been killing thousands before this incident (1,500 already only this year), and that in most cases they killed male school children and let the females go home with instructions to get married. Nor was it novel, even after the news broke of the 267 school girls’ abduction, that over 300 people had been killed (not just kidnapped) when Boko Haram attacked a town market, later rampaging through the streets and burning houses in a town left unprotected while soldiers were pulled away to search for the missing school children. The potential for these girls to be sold into slavery seems only ancillary to the fact that they were taken to begin with, and concerns over their welfare vis-à-vis the sex trade functions as a separate entity to general considerations that there exists a market for slavery at all to this day. 

The First Lady on Twitter

     Twitter trends are also more successful when they are tied into information that originates from a news source. Finally, a critical component of trends on twitter is the extent the message is retweeted by others around the network. Obviously the social standing of the individual or group is the driving force of the message’s influence, but just as Oprah propelled the Kony video to prominence such has been the purpose served by the First Lady Michelle Obama. Thus it isn’t simply the number of followers an influencer like Mrs. Obama has, but how her message gets multiplied as it is retweeted throughout the internet that helps a topic grow into a trend.

          The unfortunate reality as seen above is that because trending tragedies are intrinsically a function of social media, and though their content is novel and important, the outcome of the grievance is not an essential component to its enduring popularity. This means that even if the girls aren’t ever found this story as a social trend is likely to dwindle in popularity until relatively quickly becoming extinguished. The extreme upside to hashtag activism is that public outrage in democratic counties can nudge governments into real action, committing tangible resources to the cause in ways that will endure long after it is no longer en vogue to talk Nigerian domestic security issues among friends. Already the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Spain and Israel have sent teams to aid in the search for the girls, with the lone non-democracy China not wanting to be left off the global power scene. French President Francois Hollande has even stated that his country’s efforts in Nigeria, though prompted by the kidnappings, will be dedicated not just to returning the kidnapped girls, but to bringing about the end of the Islamic group.

          Though we can get mad about the fair weather activists we all encounter across the global mediascape, the truth is that their actions often grab the attention of key decision makers and influencers. The narrow scope of these efforts though is one of the sad realities of how the world works. Nearly everyone will get behind a few topics, but hardly anyone will bat an eye with a majority of the most pressing issues of our time.

Deeper: While it is important to get figure heads behind causes like Mrs. Obama, in the actual processes of social media it falls to the organizations that people go to for their information to retweet or propagate the trend. Roughly a year after Kony 2012 Invisible Children released a video called 'What happened to Kony 2012?', which gathered fewer than 200,000 views. Google has a fun little tool for gauging social trends through internet searches. If we add search queries for Michael Jackson around the time of his death to the chart from the opening of this article it is nearly impossible to see the other two trends and extremely difficult to see Kony 2012.