On the evening of April 14, 2014, a group of armed men stormed into a girls’ boarding school in the northeastern Nigerian city of Chibok and carried away more than 200 students preparing for their final exams. The young women were taken to the remote forest hideout of a little-known Islamist sect called Boko Haram.
For weeks, hardly anyone seemed to notice that the students were missing. Then the news went viral on Twitter, prompting some of the world’s most recognizable people – Pope Francis, Kim Kardashian, The Rock, Michelle Obama – to fire a hashtag that lit billions of phones: #BringBackOurGirls. Those four words quickly showed the power of social media to advance a distant cause. Girls became a global priority. To free them, some of the most powerful countries in the world sent their military forces, drones, satellites and advanced surveillance equipment. And then, just as quickly, Twitter’s hive spirit swarmed to the next viral cause, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and never came back.
Still, those few days of tweets ignited a fuse that continues to burn years later. Launched in 2014, the rescue mission has quietly and covertly evolved into a military deployment in four West African countries. Nigeria’s military, US diplomats and terrorism specialists are still baffled that a short-lived series of tweets have shaped the conflict with Boko Haram and other jihadist groups so profoundly that they continue to kidnap children for fame, soldiers and ransom.
Through hundreds of interviews with officials involved in rescue efforts and 20 of the Chibok girls who had won their freedom, we found a trail of far-reaching but unintended results that neither advocates nor cynics dismissed the campaign as “ slacktivism ” for years. , could have foreseen.
The frenzied international coverage inspired both a race to liberate the women and a shift in Boko Haram tactics. Within months, the group boasted that it had abducted tons of young women, released some and sent others as the first female suicide bombers. “The hashtag unwittingly provided Boko Haram with a roadmap to use gender violence to promote its global brand,” said Nigerian writer Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani, who has interviewed more than 200 of the Chibok families.