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With its slick Hollywood production values, the film has been an almost instant viral success,dominating Twitter worldwide and having one of the fastest ever take-offs on You Tube. The hashtag #stopkony has had hundreds of thousands of tweets, and millions of people nowknow something about Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army

The film made by an American charity called Invisible Children – about the plight of childrenin Uganda at the hands of the warlord Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lords Resistance Army(LRA) guerilla group. His group is said to have abducted 60,000 children.

The Kony 2012 video is an example of what Richard Dawkins calls a meme

A meme is an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within aculture

The Kony 2012 video is the most dramatic demonstration so far of how an idea canspread over the globe via a channel that is beyond the reach and control of established media outlets. YouTube operates outside the control of conventionalgatekeepers and editorial sieves

However it also highlights the problems of distilling a complex regional problem such asthe Lord’s Resistance Army into social-media-friendly hashtags and Facebook updates.

Kony 2012

• Kony 2012 has attracted criticism: There are questions about:

• 1. The charity's funding,

• 2. Its targeting of US leaders instead of African leaders to instigate change, (the implicit assumption being that Africans are hopeless and that the only solutions to their problems come from white foreigners).

• 3. And accusations that it is failing to criticise the Ugandan government, with its poor human rights record

• Charlie Brooker

Writing in the Guardian Michael Wilkinson argues:

It also makes the point that there is currently no threat to remove the US advisers who are working with the Uganda government to track down the army – Invisible Children'skey aim is to force the US government to keep them there.

People watching a screening of Kony 2012 in Lira, northern Uganda, an area which was ravaged by the LRA. Photograph: James Akena/Reuters

The reaction?

• Puzzlement, then anger, which boiled over into scuffles and stone-throwing that sent organisers fleeing for cover.

• "They were all saying, 'This is not about us, it does not reflect our lives'."

• There was particular criticism of the Stop Konycampaign's use of merchandise, such as bracelets and T-shirts, which victims said they find offensive.

• One young man who lost four brothers and one of his arms said afterwards: 'How can anybody expect me to wear a T-shirt with Kony's name on it?'"

Emmy Okello, a radio journalist in Lira, said: "I cannot understand the intention of this video.It is difficult to account to us if you are not including local people. What has angered peopleis that the video is about a white person, not about the victims. All of them came herehoping to see video that tells their story."

Jason Russell,Founder ofInvisible Children

Under colonialism kingdomsthat had been historicallyantagonistic to one anotherwere merged into largercolonial units

For example in Uganda the rivalkingdoms of Buganda & Bunyoroin Uganda

In contemporaryUganda the broad division is betweenthe Bantu groups tothe south, such as theBanganda and the Nilotic groups of thenorthsuch as the Acholi and Langi

Yoweri Museveni

Joseph Kony

During the conflict government put more than one and a half million civilians intointernal displacement camps without access to even the most basic necessities