On the night of April 14, 2014, a gang of gunmen broke into a girls ’boarding school in the northeastern Nigerian city of Chibok, taking away more than 200 students who had prepared for the graduation exams. The girls were taken to the remote forest hideout of a little-known Islamist sect called Boko Haram.
For weeks, almost no one seemed to notice that students were missing. The news then went viral on Twitter, prompting some of the world’s most famous people – Pope Francis, Kim Kardashian, The Rock and Michelle Obama – to shoot a hashtag that lit up billions of phones. : #BringBackOurGirls. These four words quickly demonstrated the power of social media to advance a distant cause. Girls became a global priority. To free them, several of the world’s most powerful countries sent their armed forces, drones, satellites and sophisticated surveillance equipment. And then, just as quickly, the Twitter hive’s mind slackened toward its next viral cause, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and never returned.
Still, those few days of tweets ignited a fuse that continues to burn years later. The rescue mission launched in 2014 has evolved quietly and covertly towards a military deployment in four West African countries. The Nigerian military, U.S. diplomats and terrorism specialists still express bewilderment that a series of short-lived tweets shaped the conflict with Boko Haram and other jihadist groups so deeply, that they continue to kidnap children for fame, soldiers and rescue.
Through hundreds of interviews with officials involved in the rescue efforts and 20 of the Chibok girls who won their release, we found a trail for years of extensive but unwanted results that neither advocates nor cynics dismissed. the campaign as “slacktivism” could have foreseen.
The frantic international coverage inspired both a race to liberate women and a change in Boko Haram tactics. A few months later, the group boasted of having kidnapped many more young women, rescuing some of them and sending others as the first suicidal women. “The label inadvertently provided Boko Haram with a roadmap for using gender-based violence to promote its global brand,” says Nigerian writer Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani, who has interviewed more than 200 Chibok families.