The resulting legal fees ultimately left the artist bankrupt and in deep dept. Fritsch uploaded the four-minute clip to his own site, it made its way to YouTube in 2006, and it went viral in 2007, spawning spin-offs, remixes, and T-shirts made and sold by Fritsch himself.Īs it turned out, the still-anonymous Technoviking himself was less than enthused about the whole thing, according to Wired, and decided to take legal action against Fritch for infringement of personality rights. It was during the "F*ckparade" electronic music festival in Berlin on July 8, 2000, that artist Matthias Fritsch took those first hallowed steps toward making internet history, when he filmed a towering, jacked, and super-intimidating bare-chested dude dancing down a street to pulsing techno music. He was detained and hospitalized, and cited "extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration" as the cause in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. As reported by The Guardian in 2013, Russell ran himself ragged trying to defend the campaign to the media and the angry hordes online in the days after the viral explosion, and his mental wellbeing took a hammering, culminating in a very public and very naked mental breakdown on the streets of San Diego. Russell and his movement were criticized for misrepresenting the facts and painting an oversimplified picture of the situation in Uganda, and for receiving lots of donations but not actually achieving anything. It wasn't long before "Kony 2012" became something of a punchline.
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Titled "Kony 2012," the video accumulated more than 100 million views online in six days, leading Time to designate it the most viral video ever. In 2012, activist and filmmaker Jason Russell posted a video online as part of a campaign against Ugandan militia leader and wanted war criminal Joseph Kony (above).