The proliferation of Internet platforms like Blogspot, WordPress, Twitter and Facebook has brought with it countless articles and lectures on the functions of social media, addressing both the negative and the positive outcomes of the rapid progression in communication technology.

Towards the end of finals week and the beginning of spring break, social media was exploding with conversation of the California-based Invisible Children and their social media campaign “Kony2012.”

The campaign was marketed with a video giving a brief explanation of the LRA war criminal, Joseph Kony, and how, through putting pressure on the U.S. government, “we” can stop his reign of terror.

There were numerous things to be said about the means and ends of the campaign itself,  but I believe what the mainstream media failed to fully explore was the character of the social media strategy Invisible Children employed, and what this means for contemporary engagement with international human rights issues.

When focused on the undoubted potential of social media, human rights campaigns such as Kony2012 are subject to a number of pressures that often produce shallow and lazy analysis of some of the most complex international issues.

 The video itself is emblematic of such glibness. The history of Kony, and the LRA generally, is condensed to a narrative about Invisible Children’s work with LRA survivors. As a result, “Kony2012” betrays a deficient analysis of the extensive, complex history of Central Africa.

The “grassroots” character of the campaign combined with the focus on raising awareness through social networking, gave every Twitter and Facebook user the ability to claim a stake in the cause and, by extension, the conflict itself after gleaning hardly 20 minutes of actual knowledge of the issue from a video they could watch during their free time. Granted, Invisible Children was not ignorant of this fact.

In an article in Foreign Policy, Invisible Children responded to their critics and defended their choice to present the conflict in this way, arguing that the whole point of the film was to show a shortened and condensed narrative so that people would actually watch it and it could go viral.

After all, the line of reasoning suggests, if the idea is to harness the power of the Internet to make Joseph Kony a household name, we’d probably have less luck posting hour-long documentaries on Facebook and Twitter.

The motive here is certainly understandable: in order to engage in the unreasonably fast social media sphere, everything has to be sharp, well-produced and, naturally, short.

However, when it comes to human rights, is it not alarming that we only respond if the article or video is short and interesting enough for our fast-paced lifestyles?

 If it means losing out on crucial facts of history and the complexities of the modern world, is it worth it?

It is not that integrating social networking into the human rights movement is completely unethical. It is clearly an integral part of raising awareness for our progressive generation.

However, the root of the campaign, the film, caters to the worst parts of our connected, technologically-advanced selves: Our short attention spans and our lack of sincerity.

It left the campaign, as well as those who so quickly supported it, open to intense criticism of being shallow and somewhat ignorant of the world they live in.

These kinds of social networking campaigns allow organizations like Invisible Children to start successful campaigns around very controversial issues by appealing to the public through emotional videos and glib analysis that blatantly ignore crucial parts of history that are necessary to promote reasoned discussion of how best to solve our common problems.

It is time that we, as users of social media and educated young students expect more from our campaigns, regardless of the issues they raise.

We must begin to use social networking as a way of promoting causes backed by the facts and research  we have taken the time to read and critique independently.

While sharing something on Twitter or Facebook lets others know what we are interested in and support, in the case of human rights, it is vital that we value the truth first and the complexities of history and of life in the 21st century.