Hashtag Wars: Who’s Behind the Nigeria Social-Media Movement?

10 years ago | Posted in: women | 774 Views

Can #BringBackOurGirls help in the fight against Boko Haram in Nigeria, or is it just causing distraction?

The ongoing nightmare of nearly 300 girls kidnapped in Nigeria by militants from the group Boko Haram is now an international concern, and the social media campaign #BringBackOurGirls, is receiving much of the credit. Now, on Twitter, a Los Angeles filmmaker is being accused of taking that credit after she appeared on national news to discuss her #BringBackOurGirls Facebook campaign.

In TV appearances, director Ramaa Mosley was credited by hosts with creating the #BringBackOurGirls hashtags, and she’s accused by dozens of Twitter users of attempting to benefit monetarily from the viral campaign. The anger has extended even to Mosley’s Wikipedia page, where a section titled #BringBackOurGirls was added to her profile on the open-edit encyclopedia Thursday.

Shared hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter, #BringBackOurGirls has been adopted by humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International and UNICEF in their own campaigns to bring attention to Nigeria’s ongoing human rights crisis. On Thursday, Michelle Obama shared her photo holding a #BringBackOurGirls sign in a tweet signed “mo” to indicate she typed it personally. It’s been retweeted more than 49,000 times.

“It’s important to honor the voices of Nigerian women and credit this local, grassroots movement.”

So does it matter who launched a hashtag if it brings attention to these high school students, ages 15 to 18, still missing after they were abducted by armed terrorists from their boarding school on April 15?

Yes, says Kimberly C. Ellis, an Africana scholar and author of an upcoming book about activism and culture on Twitter titled “The Bombastic Brilliance of Black Twitter.” Ellis, who does performance art under the name Dr. Goddess, has written and spoken extensively about how the persistence of Black Twitter — a name given to an extremely active base of tweeters around African-American issues — made Trayvon Martin national news.

“It’s important to honor the voices of Nigerian women and credit this local, grassroots movement,” Ellis told NBC News…. see more

source: nbcnews

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