Kony 2012 and Cascade Manipulation
Kony 2012 was a social media phenomenon that rose from obscurity to seemingly take over the internet in only a few days. Twitter provided a running string of compliments and promotions for this campaign, which resulted in a countrywide approval for the cause. This spread, while certainly having something to do with the content, also came about as a result of clever manipulation and setup by the founders of Kony 2012, Invisible Children.
Before launching the campaign, Invisible Children set up a young and motivated group of mostly religious individuals out of small to medium sized towns in order to create a base for the promotion. When one draws out the network of initial twitter support for Kony 2012, we see many nodes emerge, most of which are focused on physical locations. This allows us to see the initial base that Invisible Children set up, wherein they began their promotion – in places like Birmingham, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma City.
Using the theory of cascades, we know that one is not likely to partake in something that the majority of society does not partake in, thus setting up a basis for promotion is crucial. One will not likely share a video if it only has a few views, no matter the content. Because of the large base set up, Kony 2012 was able to spread extremely rapidly throughout our society, as social acceptance combined with important content led many to promote the campaign through Twitter and Facebook. The promotion acted as a cascade because many were influenced more by their friends’ responses to the subject, and thus shared due to social pressure rather than any philanthropic mindset. Each person has a certain level of saturation, after which they will share the video. As time went on, more and more people saw that their friends had shared the Kony 2012 video, more and more people reached their level of saturation, and thus they shared it too. Although many promoted Kony 2012 due to what they thought were purely their inate goodness, the manipulation of network theory done by the founders caused a cascade which caused the majority of these people to share the video.
http://blog.socialflow.com/post/7120244932/data-viz-kony2012-see-how-invisible-networks-helped-a-campaign-capture-the-worlds-attention