On the evening of April 14, 2014, a group of armed men stormed a girls’ boarding school in the city of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria, taking away more than 200 students they had prepared for their exams. The young women were taken to the remote forest hideout of a little-known Islamic sect called Boko Haram.
For weeks, no one seems to notice that the students are missing. Then the news went viral on Twitter, urging some of the world’s most recognizable people – Pope Francis, Kim Kardashian, The Rock, Michelle Obama – to fire a hashtag that illuminates billions of phones: #BringBackOurGirls. These four words quickly showed the power of social media to advance a distant cause. The girls have become a global priority. To free them, some of the most powerful countries in the world sent their armed forces, drones, satellites, and sophisticated surveillance equipment. And then, just as quickly, Twitter’s hive spirit swelled to its next viral cause, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and never returned.
The few days of tweets, however, ignited a fuse that continued to burn years later. The rescue mission launched in 2014 has quietly and covertly developed into a military deployment in four West African countries. Nigeria’s military, US diplomats and terrorism specialists are still stunned that a short series of tweets is so deeply ingrained in the conflict with Boko Haram and other jihadist groups, who are still kidnapping children for fame, infantry and ransom.
Through hundreds of interviews with officials involved in rescue efforts and 20 of the Chibok girls who won their freedom, we found a year-long trail of far-reaching but unintended outcomes, which neither the advocates nor the cynics who campaign as’ slacktivism ‘could not provide finish.
The insane international coverage inspired a race to free the women and a shift in Boko Haram tactics. Within months, the group boasted that they had abducted many more young women, redeemed some and sent others as the first female suicide bombers. “The hashtag has subconsciously provided Boko Haram with a roadmap to use gender-based violence to promote its global brand,” said Nigerian author Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani, who interviewed more than 200 of the Chibok families.