Hashtag activism makes small voices bigger, but big enough?

[Commentary] The massive attention-grabbing success of the Kony 2012 campaign, despite all the very legitimate criticism lobbed at it, seemed too many to be an encouraging sign of how a relatively small organization could use social media to educate the public about a serious issue in a faraway country. At a minimum, far more Americans now know the name Joseph Kony than did before March 2012. But is it actually any easier to gain attention for humanitarian issues through social media than it is through traditional media?

Trevor Thrall, Dominik Stecula and Diana Sweet argue that it isn't in a recent article for the International Journal of Press/Politics. The paper contains a number of interesting findings from a survey of traditional and social media attention given to 257 human rights non-governmental organizations between 2010 and 2012. For instance, just three NGOs -- Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam -- accounted for 50 percent of the news appearances. Meanwhile, “Of the 65 NGOs in the lowest quartile of news attention, just two had above average social media visibility.

[Keating is a staff writer at Slate]