We recently explained thatclicktivism can be a great thing. Though it’s hard to tell whether online petitions can gain much traction in real life, there’s a real importance to bringing awareness to issues, especially when it comes to the issue of more than 200 girls kidnapped from their school in Chibok, north-eastern Nigeria. As girls’ education rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai put it when talking about the girls, who have been taken by Boko Haram, a terrorist organization who plan to sell them: ‘If we remain silent then this will spread, this will happen more and more and more.’
However, it doesn’t really help the cause when the internet can be a source for so many inaccuracies. Just like a photo of a Canadian child crying was recently used to illustrate a front cover story about UK food banks, it shouldn’t quite matter, but it kind of does when images are used out of purpose, because these stories need to be covered and spread with integrity.
First off, there’s the Real Men Don’t Buy Girls meme. Featuring celebrities such as Sean Penn, Ashton Kutcher and Bradley Cooper holding up signs saying ‘Real Men Don’t Buy Girls’, it got tweeted thousands of times, trending in the US, Nigeria, Spain and the UK. It got us thinking, though. Are the men of Boko Haram (whose name means ‘all Western education is sinful’) really going to sit up and take notice because Ashton Kutcher (who, might we add, hasn’t really been in a good film in a long time) is telling them to not sell girls into sex slavery?
Well, of course not. And that’s not even the intention of the message – because the photo was taken 3 years ago. As part of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s Real Men Don’t Buy campaign, they got celebrities to tell people to not get involved in sex trafficking girls. Ashton ballsed this endeavour up by claiming that 100,000 -300,000 American girls were at risk of being trafficked, when actually that figure was way off the mark.
Anyway, speaking of off the mark, lots of photos attached to the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, which has been retweeted over 1.6m times in the past week are actually of girls from Guinea-Bissau, more than 1000 miles from Nigeria, and have nothing to do with the kidnappings. Ami Vitale, who took the photos, told the* New York Times*: ‘I know these girls. I know these families, and they would be really upset to see their daughters’ faces spread across the world and made the face of a terrible situation. This is personal. Even if they weren’t dear friends, it’s the principle. We can’t pick up any photo and use it out of context. I can’t help but wonder that they thought this was ok just because my friends are from Africa. If it were white people from another country in the photos, this wouldn’t be considered acceptable.’
Lessons learned? Make sure you know what you’re retweeting. Because as much as talking about Boko Haram and other extremist groups’ sustained assaults on women’s rights to education is important, we need to be accurate in what we say otherwise we’re not exactly offering up an exemplary alternative.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.