Network Analysis Exposes Kony 2012 As Right Wing Christian Propaganda

"I want to masturbate in public"

Forbes magazine ran a fascinating piece on Social Flow. Social Flow used their network analysis software to track connections between Twitter feeds that all had “#Kony2012” in the text.

What they found was nothing short of illuminating. A visualization of the data can be seen at the bottom of this post.

We expect that connected Twitter users will be linked by geographic region and would expect more connections in large urban areas such as New York and LA. Far from being clustered in metropolises, people promoting Kony 2012 were located in smaller cities, such as Pittsburgh, Dayton, OH, Birmingham, AL and Noblesville, IN (wherever that is):

“The large cluster on the top right includes users from Birmingham Alabama who were some of the earliest to publicize the video. The cluster is substantially larger than the others, leading us to believe that Invisible Children had strong roots in Alabama. Additionally, the hashtag#Kony2012 initially trended in Birmingham on March 1st, a few days before the video was even placed online. Other clusters in the graph include Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City and Noblesville Indiana.” But not only were there geographical clusters, but cultural clusters as well, “This movement did not emerge from the big cities, but rather small-medium sized cities across the Unites States. It is heavily supported by Christian youth, many of whom post Biblical psalms as their profile bios.”

Amazing. Kony 2012 billed itself as a happy accident. The evidence indicates that this was a well coordinated, well funded campaign waged by a powerful religious group. “Stealth Evangelism.”

Talk To Action (thanks Jeff) is a secular watchdog organization devoted to exposing the (in my opinion) damaging and self-serving influence that the religious right has on American politics. They have recently done a series of posts on Invisible Children and the Kony 2012 campaign. The more I read about this and the more I find out about this organization, the weirder it appears to me.

Talk To Action has done some digging and found that Invisible Children receives funding from the Family and other right wing Christian sources. The Family are a powerful, though secretive US fundamentalist group and were behind Uganda’s reprehensible Parliamentary bill which called for the execution of anyone suspected of being a homosexual. Though the group denies this is the case, the evidence against them is fairly damning. It appears though, that the Family are behind much of the recent Kony 2012 craze.

Invisible Children’s founder (and creator of the Kony 2012 video) Jason Russell was heard saying the following, where he admits that IC is using the issue of suffering kids in Africa so that his batshit religious group can gain access to kids in public schools:

“Coming in January we are trying to hit as many high schools, churches, and colleges as possible with this movie. We are able to be the Trojan Horse in a sense, going into a secular realm and saying, guess what life is about orphans, and it’s about the widow. It’s about the oppressed. That’s God’s heart. And to sit in a public high school and tell them about that has been life-changing. Because they get so excited. And it’s not driven by guilt, it’s driven be an adventure and the adventure is God’s.”

This is, of course, before he got caught running around town publicly masturbating.