Healthcare social media encompasses the use of many social media platforms by both patients and clinicians, including nurses, in order to share information, stories, experience, and form communities.
Kony 2012: A Real Villain, Plus a Few Questions
By Maureen ‘Shawn’ Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief
Social media is once again proving its power to engage people around the world—this time, in the efforts to find and capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal militia group that waged a war of terror in Uganda for two decades and is now operating, in a diminished but still lethal capacity, in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan.
Kony was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005 based on his record of murder, torture, rape, and the enslavement of thousands of people, mostly women and children. At its height, his army was said to be comprised mostly of child soldiers—the children he abducted and forced to become killers, whose first victims were often their parents. Filmmakers with Invisible Children, a nonprofit organization dedicated to influencing change in Africa, created Kony 2012, a film that “went viral” last week and fuelled widespread support for a campaign to support efforts to capture Kony.
Kony and the atrocities of the LRA are not new “news.” AJN reported on the issue of child soldiers in Uganda and numerous other countries in 2005, when we profiled the work of nurses Susan McKay and […]
