Friday, April 20 was “Cover the Night,” an international day of action announced by the non-profit group, Invisible Children. Supporters were urged to hang flyers, make shirts and paint murals, anything to spread the word about Joseph Kony, a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court for the abduction of thousands of African children for use as soldiers or sex slaves.

The Kony 2012 video was posted on YouTube March 5 and already has more than 88 million views.

Some UNCW students decided to get involved and met in front of Wagoner Hall on Friday to “Cover the Dub.” They made T-shirts, painted the spirit rocks, wrote chalk messages on Chancellors’ Walk and informed passing students.

Amanda Lindsay and Morgan Grendahl, both freshman at UNCW, helped organize the event.

“This (Kony’s crimes) has been going on for years,” Lindsay said to a curious student, “Then the video went viral and this whole movement started. We hope to have him arrested by the end of 2012.”

Lindsay believes supporting the arrest effort is important because Kony is a symbol of hatred and ongoing war to the people of Africa.

“Tomorrow, more people will know about Kony than they do today, so this is a success,” Morgan Grendahl said.

Despite the enthusiasm of supporters, the Kony 2012 campaign has taken heavy criticism.

“We get the feeling that Invisible Children care more about their videos than about victims,” Victor Ochen told The Guardian. “Part of that comes from their choice of date for this event. Why April 20? Don’t they know or care that this is the anniversary of one of the worst LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) massacres, when over 300 people were killed at Atiak in 2005?”

Ochen was raised in an area severely affected by the conflict and is now a director of the African Youth Initiative Network, an organization that has suspended public screenings of the Kony 2012 film in Uganda following the outrage and hurt the first screening provoked among local residents.

Other critics have mocked the masses of online activists who were nowhere to be found during “Cover the Night.” Some said April 20 was a poor date choice for other reasons.

A popular tweet last Friday was, “I was gonna stop Kony, but then I got high.”

At any rate, the Kony 2012 video was successful in generating awareness about a serious problem that plagues Africa, but its proposed solutions may be an oversimplification of the issue.