Invisible Children (IC) the popular and wildy misleading activist organization is at it again, with the help of the Huffington Post, which is running an editorial by one of the IC founders, Laren Poole, who is asking for votes for the Chase Community Giving challenge on Facebook.

As usual, American media promotes blindly, without investigation, and Poole’s persuasive message legitimizing the work of IC to “end Africa’s longest war” with a push for Haitian relief has been featured prominently by the site.

Laren Poole, Invisible Children Founder with Uganda's current president, General Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986. Museveni led one of the first guerilla movements which used child soldiers in Uganda.

Never mind the fact that IC is highly compromised in its work — nor that the $23 million raised by school-children for Invisible Children could go a looong way in Uganda but isn’t at all visible, nor the fact that IC has received bribes from Ugandan government officials. Or the fact that IC has received a contract from USAID and the Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI). How ironic for starving Ugandans to watch films of suffering they’ve lived.

Never mind the truth?

• The Huffington Post is moderating comments; any less than supportive comments about IC are being blocked and deleted. One post very briefly showed up highlighting the fact that IC spends $3 million a year in marketing expenses alone, but was deleted after a few minutes.
• The same type of heavy moderation was seen with comments on the ABC News Blotter on a story highlighting the true story of displacement camps in northern Uganda. Many comments were censored or deleted outright.

• Change.org has also reported on controversy which emerged with IC during the Chase Community Giving Challenge, with extensive discussion in the comments.

Comment by Change.org Blogger Nathaniel Whittemore: Invisible Children has a complicated history to say the least. Their first movie, while popular with young people, bordered for many on exploitation. More troubling, they spent their first few years after that movie behaving on the ground in ways that alienated partners and generally treated the NGOs who had years of experience and more importantly, Ugandans on the ground as though the conflict was something that they had discovered for the first time, and thus should be the ring leader of the party.

No organization should be raked over the coals for things that happened years ago, but the point is that critique matters. Social change deserves the very best.

Whittemore’s blog posting on the contest began with a description of a non-profit executive who had been erroneously tagged as an IC supporter by an IC employee:

I’ve been following the Chase Community Giving challenge closely here, including documenting their extremely questionable behavior during the first round of the competition in this Open Letter. As the higher-stakes second round gets increasingly competitive, it is now one of the competing organizations — Invisible Children – who is behaving badly.

This morning, FORGE founder Kjerstin Erickson woke up and signed into Facebook to discover that she had been tagged in a picture that said “I Voted For Invisible Children” with a link to Invisible Children’s Chase Giving page. Just like any photo tagged on Facebook, the photo appeared in all of Kjerstin’s 1000+ friends wall feeds, leading them quite rationally to believe that she was supporting Invisible Children, and maybe they should, too.

The problem was that Kjerstin was NOT, in fact supporting IC, and was none to happy to see that they had made all of her contacts think she was.

This is an extremely clever – and extremely deceptive — strategy to help Invisible Children win this contest. They are not breaking any rules — of the contest or of Facebook — to do this. What’s more, if this strategy gets them in front of a lot more eyeballs, with the sole cost being that a bunch of people who weren’t going to vote for them anyway get angry, whatever — right?

More interesting responses to the Huffington Post article were posted on Yahoo News. One commenter pointed out that Poole’s article was geared more towards winning the prize, than helping Haitians:

“the article seems more directed to their winning the $1,000,000 prize than a real desire to help in Haiti.”

“It is because of this commitment that, if we win, we’ll be funding $100,000 from our general fund towards our very own relief effort in Haiti”

Does anyone else see “the if we win” as – if you help us win the million we will care enough to give 10% to Haiti – This does not pass the taste test to me.

I would have felt more comfortable if this article were a report on all the charities in the running to win the million bucks, the percentage going to overhead and to the needy. Or a report how each of those in the running are helping in Haiti.

I think I will continue to give to our local charities (that raised over $100,000 from other locals). We know that all the money went to the cause with only transportation costs going to the overhead.

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