“Brief and largely transatlantic”: Visualising #Kony2012 on Twitter

Yesterday at the Frontline Club, there was a discussion about Invisible Children’s controversial Kony2012 video.

Whatever else you think about it (and a lot of people have a lot of thoughts), the campaign has succeeded in raising awareness of the crimes of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.

I just thought I’d take the opportunity to flag up this visualisation by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute tracking the spread of the campaign on a number of related Kony hashtags on Twitter during March:

Mark Graham at the OII concludes:

"#Kony’s moment of visibility was both brief and largely transatlantic. This Western-centric pattern of information flow is not necessarily surprising and can be found on many other online platforms. However, given the video’s relevance to East Africa, and the global diffusion of Twitter (e.g. Indonesians form the world’s 6th largest population of Twitter users), we might have expected #Kony to have a slightly less clustered geography."

Worth checking out the original post on the Zero Geography blog at the OII for more details.