What I don't get is that this has been going on for years and years, but now all of a sudden there's a massive shitstorm on Facebook about it. The fact that so many people seem to be up in arms about this after watching a 30 minute documentary seems kind of shallow to me. I don't know about you guys, but there are people on my friends list who have gotten quite passionate about this despite not really knowing anything about what is going on, or how they're going to help. They seem to be doing this more for themselves rather than the people suffering in Africa. I know someone who purchased two hundred dollars worth of posters to put up to 'raise awareness'. Now raising awareness is good and all, but it comes to a point where awareness is raised enough, and you need to actually start doing something constructive.
As Gigolo said, "All they've done is give hipsters a false sense of accomplishment by letting them pretend to be activists for a day."
However, I'm still a little on the fence of whether this is a bad thing or not. Does it matter that these people are just bandwagoning on the latest fad, and that in three weeks they won't even care about the LRA ever again? To bring up an analogy that we can all relate to, the TF2 Japanese Tsunami Charity effort. There would have been many people out there who would have bought the $100 hat, not because they care about Japan or the tragedy that happened there, but because they want the hat. But does that matter? One hundred dollars to a disaster victim is $100, whether it was sent with love or not.
Then, on the '31% is better than nothing' matter: It would seem that donating to Invisible Children will make people think they've done their part and not donate to other -more cost effective- charities. But how many of these people who are donating would have donated to another charity? A charity that donates 99% of all proceeds to a good cause is useless if it can't get people impassioned enough to actually donate. This Kony 2012 campaign mightn't be donating that much money percent wise, but it sure seems effective at getting large numbers of people impassioned enough to actually donate.
(Note: this doesn't mean I support this charity, it still seems like a bit of a crock to me, and supporting military intervention seems like a very poor way to go about this sort of problem)