Bring Back Our Girls

It is undeniable that social media has become the most shareable, durable and global collection of voices that the world has ever seen — one which is increasingly difficult to ignore. These days, a virally concept, behaviour, style or idea that most commonly known as, Internet meme, has behave like a virus, traveling from person to person very quickly. Internet meme can be discrete as a ‘package of culture’ that passes from mouth to mouth, generation to generation, in the form of videos, hashtags, pictures or even phrases. According to Richard Dawkins (1973), there are three characteristics of an Internet memes; fidelity, fecundity and longevity. Online campaigns, such as the #BringBackOurGirls has also embraces the concept of Internet meme, however, there are some aspects that unstrategically has stunted the process and makes things does not work properly.

Bring Back Our Girls

On the night of April 14, 2014, Boko Haram — an extremist and militant group operating mostly in northeastern Nigeria — kidnapped about 300 schoolgirls from a boarding school in the village of Chibok, Nigeria. On the first few hours after the kidnapping, 57 of the schoolgirls managed to escaped but for the rest, their fate are still remain unclear. These schoolgirls who were kidnapped are forced to be married with the insurgents and sold into slavery.

Campaign Analysis

As the world connected and responded, their cries of the abduction has lead to online and offline campaigns powered by the desire of people to rescue them. The news has caused a global outrage as parents and citizen used the social media to complain towards how slow the governments works and in giving out responses. After Nigerian protestors marched calling of action on the parliament in the capital of Abuja, Nigeria, on April 30, 2014, cities around the world have followed to organised their own marches, including at the Nigerian embassy in London, United Kingdom and rally around New York, United States as the Empire State Building being lit up in red and purple to symbolise an end of violence against women.

Other than that, a social media campaign under the hashtag of #BringBackOurGirls has rised up. It was first coined by a Nigerian lawyer in Abuja, Ibrahim M. Abdullahi, as he tweeted the call in a speech by Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, the Vice President of the World Bank for Africa to “Bring Back the Girls!”. Since then, it has exploded globally across social media — Facebook and Twitter are the well adapted mediums for this campaign.

Live report on Ezekwesili’s speech on Facebook, followed by a tweet by

Abdullahi that included the hashtags of #BringBackOurGirls and #BringBackOurDaughters.

Ezekwesili, later that day, tweeted the hashtag too.

Responders believed that by spreading #BringBackOurGirls, it would do something as the power of solidarity and support from all cadres, nation and countries were engaged together. Public figures then also took turns to be counted. High-profile names like the former United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and Hollywood actress, Angelina Jolie have also lent their voices into the campaign. A tweet by Clinton has been retweeted for 11,000 times as she wrote, "Access to education is a basic right and an unconscionable reason to target innocent girls. We must stand up to terrorism. #BringBackOurGirls”. Yet, possibly the most shared tweets were from the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, as she tweeted a picture of herself holding up a sign with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls written on it along with the text, “Our prayers are with the missing Nigerian girls and their families. It is time to #BringBackOurGirls”. The tweet collectively received more than 57,000 retweets and 34,000 favourites in less than a week. In the following days, Michelle Obama’s #BringBackOurGirls sign-holding picture became a popular subject of micro memes as a satirical commentary on the running trend of sign-holding campaigns within social media activism.

Mentions on Twitter of #BringBackOurGirls spiked since then, according to data provided by Topsy, it was tweeted 268,616 times by May 1, 2014, 916,984 by May 5, 2014 and 3,586,486 by the end of May, 2014.

By then end of May, 2014, mentions on Twitter of #BringBackOurGirls

has reached up to 3,585,485 tweets.

More than any other, the campaign has shown that social media has now changed from about a platform of people sharing their daily life into a bustling conversation platform of the current affairs. It is populated not just by close relatives but now, celebrities, journalists and politicians are all there too, poised to respond to the problems that matter the most in the society. Some people argue that there is an egotistical element towards how people are sharing the trending hashtag with the sign-holding pictures as it is just for a trend of contribution instead of an honest affliction towards the issue. Nonetheless, campaigns as widespread as #BringBackOurGirls have inevitably picked up and taken to newspapers and constituency offices, where it proves that online action are real.

During the height of the campaign, the action has ensured the Federal Government of Nigeria that first denied the abduction to paid attention to the case of rescuing the schoolgirls and the general security of its citizens. The Paris Summit for Security in Nigeria was held and as a result actions for multilateral collaboration were agreed upon. The United States President, Barack Obama, also heard the voices and acted by sending 80 military personnel and specialist intelligence teams to Nigeria in order to assess and advise the situation.

However, it can be argued that #BringBackOurGirls is considered as an ‘clicktivism’ campaign. According to Max Halupka, clicktivism is an activity that undertaken on social media whose purpose is to response to something encountered online rather than a considered political act like voting. It is also non-committal, which means it does not require any further action rather than these responses that happened online, like sharing, liking or tweeting. Because despite all the promises that were repeatedly declared by the world’s governments, nearly two years later, unfortunately, the schoolgirls are still missing and as supported by analytics from Google Trends, it can be seen that in just within months, people were slowly losing their interest towards the campaign while the fight is far from over for those schoolgirls. Reports have suggested that 57 of the girls has escaped their captors, some of them are likely sold off as child brides or sex slaves and recently, a United Nation official said that there is evidence of they may be dead.

The interest over time of people searching about Boko Haram as the keyword on Google and #BringBackOurGirls mentions on Twitter.

In the end, when people are contributing on spreading a hashtag on social media, sure it must make them feel good about themselves but there is still a huge question mark over what using hashtags are actually does for those on the receiving end. The truth is only real governmental pressure and action can do that and they are the ones who needs to listens and act, when enough people speak.

Conclusion

Social media has played a vital role in the campaign of #BringBackOurGirls. The aim of the campaign was to bring back the kidnapped schoolgirls home and to improve the government’s accountability in Nigerians security issues. Since the beginning, the campaign has touched an emotional chord within the people as it falls on deaf ears and cold hearts. Also, it has become an eye-opener for everyone that this incident could have been happened to anyone’s daughters, nephews or sisters. The impact that the campaign has created was penetrating into the minds of the people and delivered a stronger sense of solidarity within everyone around the world, which includes celebrity and public figures. Since then, the campaign has exploded and gone viral as it reached more than 3 million mentions on Twitter in just less than a month. However, it seen that the campaign does not have a long lasting impact in everyone. After the campaign peaked, there has been no following action from neither the public or from the world’s governments. Resulting in just within months, the analytics supported by the Google Trends has shown that public has lost their interest within the campaign where the damages were not even fixed yet. Ultimately, where most people thinks that online activities has contributed on fixing a thing, the truth is only real governmental action can do that.