A 30-minute YouTube film critical of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has logged close to 37 million views since Monday, but the charity behind the video is suddenly on the defensive, forced to explain its motives, financial practices and religious affiliations. 
 
 Invisible Children Inc. said its intention was to "create a cultural tipping point" even as critics took to the Internet to recount their concerns. 
 
 "We want to do some epic things because our time on Earth is so short," Jason Russell, an Invisible Children co-founder and filmmaker, told ABC News. "Why not do this? Start here with Kony. Use him as the example of what injustice looks like in the world and then we're going to move to the next one and the next one." 
 
 The San Diego-based nonprofit uploaded the video "Kony 2012" to bring attention to Kony and the rebel group Lord's Resistance Army, which human rights groups say has terrorized central Africa for years. The video is part of a campaign that includes an April 20 call for supporters to blanket their cities with Kony 2012 posters. 
 
 Click Here: How 'Stop Kony' Went Viral 
 
 With the viral sensation, however, has come criticism. Several Internet sites have drawn attention to the group's evangelical roots, a 2008 photo of the charity's founders posing with guns and how it has disbursed its funds. 
 
 Invisible Children responded to most of the allegations in a statement on its Website. 
 
 Russell said that although the group's concept -- "treat our children around the world the way we would treat our own children -- was faith-based, Invisible Children didn't want to be defined that way. 
 
 "We are unorthodox and if you don't accept the unorthodoxy of what we do, then you won't get it," he said. 
 
 Invisible Children Has 'Supporters From All Walks of Life' 
 
 "We have supporters from all walks of life and all backgrounds and we're united under this umbrella," he said. "This umbrella of peace and exposing the story of the Invisible Children that Joseph Kony has had for this long." 
 
 But an image circulating the Internet today has highlighted the group's uneasy relationship with its detractors. In the photo, Invisible Children's founders -- Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole -- posed with guns with members of the Sudan People's Liberation Army. Critic Grant Oyston of the student-run blog Visible Children said that the photograph showed that the group supported direct military intervention. 
 
 On the charity's website, Russell said the photo had been taken at the 2008 Juba Peace Talks during which Kony was supposed to sign a peace treaty. He called the snapshot a "joke photo" to take back to family and friends. 
 
 But Glenna Gordon, an Associated Press photographer who took a few pictures that day, including the one of the founders with the weapons, said on her blog that she felt uncomfortable taking the photo. 
 
 "It just contributes to the stereotypes of kids messing stuff up by showing the worst of the worst and showing it without context," she wrote. "It adds to the Invisible Children bad a-- mythology even while attempting to cast doubt on their practices. ... At the end of the day, I do hope that all of this can make us look at Invisible Children with a more critical glance." 
 
 Invisible Children Is Created 
 
 The charity came about after the three Southern California filmmakers headed to Africa in 2003 and later released a documentary about the child soldiers. 
 
 According to Human Rights Watch, in the past 20 years, Kony's LRA has killed and mutilated thousands of civilians -- and forced children to become fighters -- in Uganda and neighboring countries. Kony and his top commanders are wanted by the International Criminal Court. 
 
 In 2010, President Obama signed into law a bill aimed at stopping the LRA and bringing stability to Uganda. And in October, he sent 100 troops to Uganda to help regional forces battle the LRA and capture or kill Kony. 
 
 'Kony 2012' and Invisible Children's Programs 
 
 Russell said the charity's programs in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan included the building of a rehabilitation center, an expanded and early-warning radio network connecting communities and an LRA crisis tracker, which is a mapping platform and data-collection system. 
 
 But Visible Children pointed out that although Invisible Children had spent more than $8.6 million last year, "only 32 percent went to direct services with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production." 
 
 Russell defended the group's spending, saying that Invisible Children needed to spend money on advocacy and awareness of young people, especially in the West. 
 
 "Let's be honest. They set the agenda. What they like matters," he said. "We need to educate and transform and reshape [their] paradigm to saying, 'This is what really matters. This is what we can really do.' ... So we do spend money on our films and on our advocacy and awareness. We are proud of that. 
 
 "When someone posts only 30 percent or 40 percent is going to the actual ground -- it's an old paradigm where every nonprofit was trying to get 98 percent of all funds to the region that's in conflict. That's an old model. 
 
 "We have strategically been putting all the puzzle pieces, all the dominoes in place, and everything is prepped for him to come to the Hague. ... This is never ever happened in 26 years of the conflict," he said. "We need to make sure everyone is aware who Kony is. By making him famous, we will bring his crimes to the light and bring the children who've been abducted back home. That's the goal." ||||| By Chris O'Brien / March 7, 2012 at 1:21 PM 
 
 It seems like over the past few months, we’ve seen an increased pace of online activism, an onslaught of campaigns. There was the SOPA campaign, the Occupy Wall Street social media meme, and last year the Arab Spring. Recently, Rush Limbaugh has been feeling the heat of a social media campaign stemming from his inflammatory remarks about a woman. 
 
 But over the past 24 hours, the latest social media campaign to explode is called “Kony 2012.” The centerpiece is a 30-minute video posted by Jason Russell. The goal is to raise awareness, and create international pressure for the arrest of Joseph Kony: 
 
 Since 1987, Joseph Kony has abducted more than 30,000 children in Central Africa and forced them to be child soldiers in his Lord’s Resistance Army. The KONY 2012 campaign employs film, social media, street art, and face-to-face interaction to make the case that the arrest of Joseph Kony this year is one thing we can all agree on. 
 
 In the video, Russell says he intends to use the power of the Web, via this video, to create a groundswell for justice: “If we succeed, we change the course of human history…Its only goal is to stop the rebel group, the LRA, and its leader, Joseph Kony,” Russell says. “And I’m going to tell you how we’re going to do it.” 
 
 
 
 Russell records himself explaining to his son what he does in Africa, and who the “bad guys” are. In this case, Kony and LRA. But he ultimately can’t bring himself to detail all the horrors: abduction, rape, prostitution, kids being forced to mutilate each other and kill their parents. 
 
 It’s gripping and disturbing. “It’s obvious Kony should be stopped,” Russell said. “The problem is that 99.7 percent of the world doesn’t know who he is.” 
 
 Russell said he and some friends attempted to lobby the U.S. government to get involved, but the issue went nowhere at first. They were told it just wasn’t on the radar of the nation’s foreign policy. But eventually, President Obama acknowledged Kony and agreed to dispatch advisors to Uganda to help find him. 
 
 But Rusell is still worried it isn’t enough. He wants to spread Kony’s name so that it’s everywhere, convince thought leaders, celebrities and policymakers to ramp up pressure for his arrest. He wants to make sure the advisors are more than just a token effort, that they have the resources they need, and feel the public pressure to gets results. Make it a priority, until he’s captured. 
 
 The campaign also has an offline component. People are putting up yard signs, posters, and driving around vans with Kony’s name. 
 
 The culmination will be April 20, when there is a “Cover the Night” event designed to coordinate all the efforts around the world for one moment. The goal is to spend that entire night blanketing every street and yard with posters with Kony’s name. 
 
 And of course, he made the film. Watch it. It’s pretty extraordinary stuff. 
 
 But the real question is whether it can have sufficient impact to galvanize popular awareness and action. There’s an ongoing debate about the role the Internet and the Web can play in organizing people and creating movements. And already, the campaign has triggered a backlash, with critics saying that the group should be spending more on direct aid rather than staff; shouldn’t be advocating military action; and is grossly simplifying a complex situation by not highlighting government atrocities. 
 
 Foreign Affairs magazine, for instance, offered some context for the campaign and in particular noted: 
 
 “Have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil. They rarely refer to the Ugandan atrocities or those of Sudan’s People’s Liberation Army, such as attacks against civilians or looting of civilian homes and businesses, or the complicated regional politics fueling the conflict.” 
 
 This promises to be an interesting experiment that will, one way or the other, give us some insight into the relationship between the Web and popular movements. But it’s also likely to continue to inspire a robust debate about how the rest of us sort truth from propaganda when consuming digital media. 
 
 KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
– You might be hearing the name Joseph Kony a lot lately, and it's all part of a calculated media campaign to get the African warlord arrested. The group Invisible Children has posted a 30-minute video called "Kony 2012" whose sole purpose is to spread the word about his atrocities and raise international pressure to get him arrested. While that may not sound like your typical viral video, it has exploded in popularity over the last 24 hours, in part because it so "gripping and disturbing," notes the San Jose Mercury News. It helps, too, that Invisible Children is using a savvy campaign that enlists celebrities to help spread the anti-Kony message. NPR's Two-Way blog calls the video a "powerful piece of work" and provides more background about the campaign. That includes pointing to this Foreign Affairs article, which accuses Invisible Children and other groups of having "manipulated facts" to portray "Kony—a brutal man, to be sure—as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil." See the video in the gallery, which includes a push for a day of activism on April 20.