Bauer: Hashtag diplomacy won't save lives

Do you remember #BringBackOurGirls, the social media campaign launched to help rescue 276 girls abducted from a secondary school in northeast Nigeria?

Well it turns out that the online campaign has been no match for Boko Haram, a group of men willing to prey on the weak and defenseless and die for the cause of establishing an Islamic state.

You may remember that in early May the audacious mass kidnapping ignited a social media firestorm. Rescuing the girls quickly turned into a cause célébre among politicians, celebrities and commentators across the globe.

The slogan #BringBackOurGirls became a rallying cry for millions on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, where the hashtag was retweeted more than four million times.

But the attention of the world outside Nigeria soon faded. Journalists moved on to other stories; the hashtag stopped trending, a reflection that social media is failing. As the New Yorker's Naunihal Singh put it, "a viral hashtag, it seems, is a fever that breaks quickly."

But the fever of Islamic extremism is much more virulent. Boko Haram is still holding more than 200 girls captive. Most are Christians who, according to news reports, have been forcibly converted to Islam. Reports also suggest that some of the girls may have been sold in markets and spirited over the border to Chad and Cameroon.

The Nigerian government insists it is doing everything it can to rescue the girls. But it has treated the mass abduction as more of a political nuisance than a national security or humanitarian crisis.

The government first denied that the abductions had taken place then bizarrely claimed that it had liberated the girls. Patience Jonathan, Nigeria's first lady, even accused her husband's political enemies of fabricating the story to damage him politically ahead of the 2015 presidential election.

In June the Nigerian government banned demonstrations involving the activist group Bring Back Our Girls, arguing that the protests posed a security threat.

For months the group, comprised mostly of family members of the abducted, requested a meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan. It took a visit from Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani-girls education activist, to finally persuade him to meet with the group on July 22.

Boko Haram, meanwhile, seems to have been emboldened by the government's anemic response to the abductions. By one count, since the Chibok kidnappings it has carried out nine major gun and bomb attacks that have killed more than 1,000 people.

In June, Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped another 20 girls from a town only a few miles from where the original group of girls was kidnapped two months earlier.

In early July, Boko Haram attacked two towns next door, burning four churches to the ground and killing more than 30 people. And in mid-July it leveled several villages in northeast Nigeria, leaving dozens of people dead and thousands more displaced.

In a recent video Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, mocked the #BringBackOurGirls campaign and declared that he would free the girls only if President Jonathan released hundreds of the terrorist group's imprisoned fighters.

"Bring back our girls?!" Shekau shouts sarcastically with his lieutenants and a row of armored vehicles behind him. "We are telling Jonathan to bring back our arrested warriors, our army!" For its part, the Nigerian government says it is not interested in a prisoner swap.

The government insists that it knows where the girls are but doesn't want to launch a military campaign for fear that it would endanger them. Experts say that the longer the girls remain in captivity the more likely it is they won't be rescued at all.

"As the world's attention shifts to other global trouble spots, such as Iraq, intense international scrutiny is giving way to what seems like silent acceptance of the girls' fate," Gordon Brown, former British prime minister and now the United Nations special envoy on global education, told a British newspaper in June.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that #BringBackOurGirls hasn't actually brought the girls back. It is just the latest international social media campaign to fail.

#Kony2012 shined a light on Joseph Kony, the genocidal leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. The campaign garnered unprecedented attention in the western media. But it soon lost steam. Today Kony remains at large and is still committing atrocities across central Africa.

During popular uprisings in Iran and the former Soviet republic of Moldova in 2009, and in countries throughout the Middle East starting in 2010, Twitter and other social media sites were hailed as the promising new tools that would bring about revolutions. But most of those uprisings didn't lead to actual revolutions. And in those countries where permanent change has occurred, social media played only a limited role.

That's partly because relatively few people outside the West use social media. According to one estimate, at the time of the Arab Spring, many of the countries involved were responsible for less than 2% total Twitter users.

This isn't to suggest that social media campaigns are worthless. They can be helpful in raising awareness and cultivating a sense of solidarity with the oppressed. But Tweeting, posting, liking, uploading, etc. are no substitute for physical action.

In the case of the Nigerian girls, they may eventually be rescued. But if they are, it won't be the result of hashtag diplomacy; rather, it will be due to strong and serious diplomacy conducted by brave men and women willing to confront evil head-on.

Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.

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