ICC Note:

More than 240 schoolgirls have been held captive by Boko Haram for 75 days, and yet their plight has fallen out of social media savvy, argues Dan Hodges. Mass-abducted on April 14th from their secondary school in Chibok Village, a small town in Nigeria’s increasingly lawless northeast, the predominantly Christian girls have been forcefully converted to Islam, physically harmed and sold as child brides into lifetimes of sexual slavery for as little as $12 USD. Boko Haram, a radical Islamic insurgency bent on establishing a separate Islamic state, has targeted Nigeria’s northern Christians for years. 

06/28/2014 Nigeria (The Telegraph) – Where are our girls? A month ago everyone wanted to know. Michelle Obama wanted to know. David Cameron wanted to know. A whole host of celebrities, politicians and opinion formers wanted to know.

It was the campaign that social media had been invented for. From Toronto to Timbuctoo, ordinary mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters held up their hand-written signs to the world. And the world responded. “Bring back our girls,” it demanded.

But they weren’t brought back. So the world put down its signs, and moved on.

This week we have a new cause: Bring back our journalists.

It’s a worthy one. Three Al Jazeera journalists have been sentenced to seven years in jail in Egypt for the crime of “spreading false news”. Social media has mobilised again. Twitter and Facebook have come alive with thousands of images of news gatherers, politicians and celebrities with their mouths taped shut. The hand written signs have again been deployed – “#FreeAJStaff”.

They should be freed. Their incarceration is an abomination. But so is the incarceration of 250 Nigerian schoolgirls. And suddenly, they seem to have been forgotten.

They may not have been forgotten, of course. As we speak, Barack Obama’s Seal teams may be conducting their final training runs. The SAS rescue squad that had reportedly been sent to Nigeria may already have received its orders to lock and load. There could be a very good reason why world’s politicians have fallen silent.

But if that is the case, then that information won’t have been communicated to the army of celebrities and social media surfers who four weeks ago had adopted “our girls” as their crusade.

There is no reason, of course, why the plight of the Al Jazeera journalists and the plight of the Nigerian schoolgirls should be mutually exclusive. Our basic sense of compassion and intolerance of injustice should enable us to embrace more than one worthy cause at a time.

Except it’s quite clear that in the social media age, we can’t.

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