Kony 2012 – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Facebook Causes (Invisible Children of Uganda)

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If you are on Facebook, by now some of your friends have posted the “Kony 2012″ viral video. The video depicts the notorious leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony. Among multiple crimes committed, Kony is best known for his arming of children and coercing them to join his forces. To date, Kony has forced over 66,000 children to fight for him, has forced countless girls into a form of sex slavery and has caused the internal displacement of over 2,000,000 people.

A natural goal of every civilized nation would be to bring such a man to justice. And as such, even liberal President Barack Obama dispatched over 100 US special forces to Uganda to strangle Kony’s operations and drag his carcass into the halls of judgment and damnation. Since that time, the murderous rapist’s whereabouts are unknown, but many assume that since the US has wrought attention on him that he’s either in hiding or dead. But the fact of the matter is, it’s an internationally recognized problem that governments are actively pursuing.

Enter the Facebook cause. There is a video called Kony 2012. It is an emotional piece meant to educate and get everyone worked up about Kony, and then give money to a charity named Invisible Children. While this seems great and may be a good charity, several people through the internet are telling everyone to take CAUTION and not donate to this charity before doing research.

On another liberal haven, Reddit.com, non-working sleuths used all their free time to do some research. Again, these findings are opinion and not necessarily true. But they are worth mentioning:

Lord Cade; says:
This is what sort of sparked it all which is not good. The video itself is a good piece of emotional porn but that’s about it. It’s honestly NOT worth the 30 minutes when you find out somethings about the organization that is doing this [Invisible Children].

First of all, the guy who made that film get’s paid $90,000 a year. That’s for him and his family. This does not include him paying costs for film equipment, video editting software, nor does it cover travel or accomodations whilst in anywhere else. Those are all covered under the ludicrous budgets that the Invisible Children organization actually deal with. Let’s go to that now. Here are some expenses from CharityNavigator.:

Compensation of Leaders | % of Compensation relative to amount of money made by IC | Title

$88,241 | 0.99% | Ben Keesey – CEO
$89,669 | 1.00% | Jason Russell – Co-Founder/Filmmaker
$84,377 | 0.94% | Laren Poole – Co-Founder/Filmmaker

Revenue

Total Contributions: $10,334,060
Program Service Revenue: $3,423,351
Total Primary Revenue: $13,757,411
Other Revenue $7,769
TOTAL REVENUE: $13,765,180

Expenses

Program Expenses: $7,163,384
Administrative Expenses: $1,444,570
Fundraising Expenses: $286,678
TOTAL FUNCTIONAL EXPENSES: $8,894,632

Payments to Affiliates $0 Excess (Or deficit) for the year: $4,870,548

Another site, http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/ is also expressing concern about those who are behind this cause.

There is a genuine problem in many African nations. Genocide, rape squads, and rampant warfare are a great part of the dismal reality, including Uganda. Groups can exploit the sentiment brought up by such concepts and sucker money out of you. It’s not so farfetched in a world where we can let people like Idi Amin, Kony or any other genocidal, anti-humanitarian maniac exist for more than one day before raining down the full force of our hellfire upon them.

If you are looking for a good source to find out more information, Amnesty International is a very responsible choice. Following is the video that sparked the renewed interest in Kony’s whereabouts. Donate if you want, but be sure to read what others are saying. Also, don’t be a lemming. Looking to a more traditional group like Amnesty International to see what you can do to help spread awareness about various world problems, and helping those in need, is a great start.

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

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