Kony 2012: High-Beta Activism

The “Kony 2012” video has gotten tens of millions of people briefly, marginally interested in a semi-retired warlord whose current troop strength numbers in the hundreds. It’s a noble effort to solve a comparatively small problem—essentially everyone who can do anything about Joseph Kony is aware of him, and has been for years.

Whatever else the Kony 2012 campaign is, it’s a very successful viral marketing campaign. (It might be unfair to compare a non-profit campaign to a for-profit campaign. But they’re competing for the same eyeballs, so it makes sense that they can learn from each other.)

It’s very hard to draw specific lessons from the content of the campaign. If one could distill it into a formula, it would be: take an old issue that relevant people are already very informed about, blow it out of proportion, and create a 30-minute online documentary about it, which ends with a request that the viewer share it. That advice is either wrong or pretty standard.

But there’s another angle: part of what made the campaign catch on was social proof. Lots of people watched it, which convinced others that it was worth watching. While the number of people available to catalyze that reaction might correlate with the quality of the message, the sheer volume of mediocrity on the web implies that the average video to take off this way will be fairly average.

In fact, it might be below average: in social media, low quality can be a competitive advantage thanks to the weirdly competitive nature of caring about issues on the web. Whenever social networks get caught up in being very offended about a particular problem, they tend to accord social status to early adopters. This turns the video’s length into a strong signalling mechanism: a one-minute video might be worth analyzing and contradicting, but who wants to spend 30 minutes deciding not to care about something? If social network members benefit from saying they care about something, and don’t suffer from caring about bogus issues (empirically, they don’t), the optimal response to a popular opinion on a complicated issue is to repeat it.

There isn’t a good way to escape from this sinkhole without a strong stigma against having ill-considered opinions. But online activists rarely do very much, reality doesn’t present much of a brake on their theoretically doing the wrong thing.

The net result is that web culture should make the web a noisier source for information on issues, for two reasons: first, because of the low correlation between important issues and popular ones, and second because of the low correlation between popular issues and issues that get acted on. Expect breathless coverage to continue apace, though.