The founders of Invisible Children – Bobby Bailey, Laren Poole, and Jason Russell – posing with guns alongside members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). “We thought it would be funny to bring back to our friends and family a joke photo. You know, ‘Haha – they have bazookas in their hands but they’re actually fighting for peace’” said Jason Russell. Yeah, hilarious.

KONY 2012, a film and campaign by Invisible Children, has become an internet phenomenon in the past 48 hours with an astonishing 38 million people — and counting — viewing the video on YouTube and many millions more on Vimeo. The viral success of this campaign has reverberated across the internet and the following extracts from my Twitter stream offer just some of the many opinions and reactions elicited by the video.

Watch this videoby @RosebellK Kony2012; My response to Invisible Children’s campaign. wp.me/pzlH9-rj v

— karina brisby (@karinab) March 8, 2012

.@cnicholl33We are working hard to ensure Joseph Kony is brought to justice, LRA atrocities are ended and civilians protected #kony2012

— William Hague (@WilliamJHague) March 8, 2012

Excellent piece by @tmsruge on the #KONY2012 shambles; bit.ly/zfCROV

— Ed Pomfret (@EdPomfret) March 8, 2012

Haven’t had chance to see the Kony 2012 video yet, & already there’s been a backlash & a counter-backlash. And presumably a Downfall parody.

— Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) March 8, 2012

If you can’t question the approach of #KONY2012 u might need to listen to #ChimamandaAdichie youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs2…

— Rosebell Kagumire (@RosebellK) March 7, 2012

@EdPomfret @JenNedeau no one is saying the message is great. But did they make an engaging product resulting in broad based engagement? yes

— weldon kennedy (@weldonwk) March 7, 2012

OK, I just watched this, as many urged me to do: bit.ly/xWfLJS- astonishing, powerful & important. Now YOU watch it. #stopkony

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 7, 2012

I am not a fan. The best responses that I have come across today include Innovate Africa, Rosebell Kagumire and Project Diaspora — all more knowledgeable about the issues than I am. The Tumblr blog, Visible Children, is collecting many of the critiques and a Guardian blog has been tracking the story.

Despite the success of this campaign in raising awareness of the broader issues, it presents a very simplistic picture. It’s reductive. It’s disempowering. And I think it’s very unlikely to contribute significantly to the achievement of its desired aims. This is cynical campaigning for a YouTube audience more commonly drawn to videos of a dog running away from its owner or cats doing something amusing.

Invisible Children have utilised every trick in the book to create a popular online video. Emotive and dramatic commentary? Check. Sweeping ambition to change the world through the power of social media? Check. Flashy editing? Check. Cute child? Check. People dancing to feel-good music? Check.

And they have framed all this within a personal narrative that reduces the entire issue down to good versus evil and disregards the role of African actors in resolving the conflict. This all makes for great entertainment but it is misleading and serves mainly to reinforce perceptions of the passive victim and massage the egos of those campaigners ‘saving the world from the bad guys’.

By nature, all mass campaigns have to be reductive to a certain extent, in order to define key messages, communicate them effectively and garner support from a general public who don’t have time to trawl through all the research on any particular issue. But this can be done with much greater integrity and it can be framed in a way that empowers those that the campaign purports to represent. KONY2012 just feels like an exercise in money-making by a charity with a rather questionable spending record.

Judge for yourself…