On the night of April 14, 2014, a band of armed men stormed a women’s boarding school in the city of Chibok, in northeastern Nigeria, and took more than 200 students preparing for graduation exams. The girls were taken to the hiding place in the remote forest of a little-known Islamic sect called Boko Haram.
For weeks, almost no one seemed to notice that students were missing. Then the news went viral on Twitter, prompting some of the most recognizable people in the world – Pope Francisco, Kim Kardashian, The Rock, Michelle Obama – to fire a hashtag that lit billions of phones: #BringBackOurGirls. These four words quickly demonstrated the power of social media to promote a distant cause. Girls have become 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, Twitter’s hive mind swarmed its next viral cause, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and never came back.
However, those few days of tweets lit a fuse that continues to blow years later. The rescue mission launched in 2014 quietly and secretly evolved into a military deployment in four West African countries. Nigerian military, American diplomats and terrorism experts are still perplexed that a short series of tweets has profoundly shaped the conflict with Boko Haram and other jihadist groups, who continue to kidnap children for fame, soldiers and rescue.
Through hundreds of interviews with rescue workers and 20 of the Chibok girls who won their freedom, we found a year-long track of comprehensive but unintended results that neither the defenders nor the cynics who rejected the campaign as ” negligence “could have predicted.
The frantic international coverage inspired a race to free women and a change in Boko Haram’s tactics. Within a few months, the group boasted that it had kidnapped many more young women, rescuing some and dispatching others as its first female suicide bombers. “The hashtag unwittingly provided Boko Haram with a roadmap to use gender-based violence to promote its global brand,” said Nigerian writer Tricia Adaobi Nwaubani, who interviewed more than 200 Chibok families.