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. Among the most influential of advocacy groups focusing specifically on the LRA are the Enough project, the Resolve campaign, the Canadian-based group GuluWalk, and the media-oriented group Invisible Children… In their campaigns, such organizations 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. Several organizations, including the Tumblr account Visible Children, have cited this article as a reason to be wary of the tactics employed by Invisible Children.
– 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.