Kony 2012 Made Me Cry, And Not For The Reason You Think

I want to preface this before going in, because I don’t want to seem like a complete and total cynic as I go on to annihilate this attempt at a viral social movement: I expect everyone who was involved in the production of this short film and those who worked in the non-profit this promoted wanted to do good, and didn’t have any malicious intent.

The world is far different now than it was in 2012 when this was created. There was a lot more hope, there was still some illusion of the possibility that Democrats and Republicans could work together on well, anything. We had just come out of a major economic recession, and while social media was very much integrated into the world by 2012, it wasn’t a necessity or as much of a cultural behemoth as it would come to be now. There’s a reason teenagers today romanticize this time in the recent past now, because even though people my age and older don’t feel it was too long ago, 2012 was 13 years ago now.

I wanted really hard to keep that in mind, but given where are world is now, I can’t give this the benefit of the doubt.

For those who want a more modern comparison for those who weren’t politically cognizant during the time period this film was made, the only thing that this made me think of is, “What if we sold merchandise and put up political campaign-esque banners up to ‘enlighten’ the public to the many celebrities and people in power who #MeToo was created to disempower?”. Not even with statements of denouncement on the merchandise itself, just Harvey Weinstein or John Kricfalusi or R.Kelly’s face and name plastered on signs, t-shirts, and bracelets, and you just had to hope that not only would someone take notice of it, but would ask who it was.

I also found the focus on Kony himself and government involvement to stop him from committing more heinous acts and there not being an equivalent amount of focus in the film to aiding those already harmed was something that left a bad taste in my mouth even before I did admittedly very surface level background research on the reception of this film.

To coincide this, there was minimal platforming or followup on the lives of the children in Uganda that this film was supposedly about. The creator’s son, various foreign aid persons, as well as primarily Republican congresspeople got more screen time. Alongside the only time public reaction to the film was shown was when the primary child representative for Kony’s harms was when the child was crying, it feels very exploitative, and it felt very strange to me that I can only think of one exception where a child who was also victimized by Kony and his group had speaking lines.

If I’m going to be blunt about how I feel about this, knowing what I know from a very cursory look on Wikipedia, while I think this isn’t something that could be considered a large-scale movement for, “slacktivism”, I feel this was a deeply dehumanizing and misguided attempt at a privileged man to reconcile with horrors that he had seen without the background knowledge that Western intervention was the driving force for these atrocities to begin in the first place. It’s very sad and while I think this is still a problem with activism today, it seems to have gotten better and people have been able to either push their guilt aside or utilize it in a more productive way.

(Addendum: After writing this I found this Jacobin article that was published in late March of this year that is a retrospective on Kony 2012. I feel like it further justifies my statements and is on its own an interesting read. The link is here: https://jacobin.com/2025/03/kony-2012-interventionism-usaid-uganda)