***UPDATED to include a few more sources, including IC’s rebuttal to the critiques raised – more information is always a good thing.***

If you were on the internet today, you probably saw the Kony 2012 video put out by the charity Invisible Children, designed to raise awareness and create international pressure to arrest Joseph Kony, an African rebel leader who’s myriad crimes include forcibly recruiting children to fight in his Lord’s Resistance Army.

The video took off like a viral wildfire over the last 24 hours, drawing attention everywhere and whipping up a frenzy of social media sympathy and probably sold a whole lot of bracelets and activist kits. The video is slick and affecting, and seems to have really figured out how to motivate people into action, at least in situations where “action” is defined as “express support on social networking sites”.

No doubt, the raising awareness part has worked – people with internet connections, several million of them, certainly know who Joseph Kony is today when they might not have the day before. The video did it’s work, and in terms of raising public awareness about atrocities in East Africa, it’s been good work.

However, the video itself is heavy on emotional appeal and light on information, as is the rest of Invisible Children’s web site. A little further research indicates that there’s more to the story, such as the fact that Invisible Children doesn’t spend a lot of it’s income on actual charity, and it’s mission to topple people like Kony largely involves equipping the Ugandan military, which doesn’t exactly have the greatest record in terms of humanitarianism.

Also, the situation as presented in the video is somewhat out of date – Kony himself is inactive, and has been in hiding for several years, thanks in part to assistance from US governmental advisors. He’s not particularly a factor any longer (not that there aren’t others in the wings), and the situation in the region, while not great, isn’t nearly as awful today as the video presents (the video more accurately describes conditions in 2003-2004).

The previous two paragraphs are largely sourced from a few articles I found – this piece at The Daily What and this somewhat more involved piece at I’m A Fan of Postcards, which go into more detail about Invisible Children’s mission and efforts. Both talk about how while IC’s heart is in the right place, the facts that they are so light on information, and that their historical revenue-to-action ratio is low, and tends to lean toward destabilizing military intervention are troubling. I encourage you to read both pieces, and do some more digging for yourselves.

In any case, the lesson here is that every appeal for action, is, in the end, a sales pitch, and often does not include all the information necessary to make an informed decision. The Kony 2012 video has obviously touched a lot of people, otherwise we all wouldn’t have seen it three dozen times in our twitter feeds. Personally, the video really pegged my “emotional manipulation” meter, what with all the “cute kid” footage and earnest narration (this is because I’m the kind of person who’s inherently distrustful of these kind of earnest emotional appeals – want to win me over? give me facts and figures, not video of some guy explaining war crimes to his six year old). While I don’t doubt that the guys who run IC feel very strongly about their cause (which, again, at it’s heart, is a good one), their video is calculated to cause an emotional reaction in you, which for a lot of people, short-circuits the ability to think critically about what is being presented.

In the end, it’s worth your time to take a few minutes to do a little research on these sorts of appeals so you know exactly what you’re showing your support for when you slip on a rubber bracelet or click the “like” button.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t donate time or effort or money to the #kony2012 movement, or to any other charity; but rather to be sure you’ve got all the information before you so. Everyone’s got an angle, and it’s in your interest to know what that angle is before jumping in with both feet on something, no matter how easy it is or how good it feels to engage in positive social action.

3/8 update — A few more sources that I thought were useful additions: first, a post from Foreign Policy magazine getting into the complexities of the entire issue, an interesting piece at Christianity Today which addresses the “know your charities” issue, and how religion plays into the situation in East Africa, this piece at Jezebel does a pretty good job of both collecting background information and capturing my initial (and still kind of lingering) cynical reaction to the whole business, Visible Children, a clearinghouse blog of the various concerns regarding the campaign, and finally, Invisible Children’s own rebuttal to the critiques that have been made to it’s effort (which directly addresses many of the criticisms with varying degrees of success).