How The World Quickly Stopped Caring About The Kidnapped Nigerian Girls In 3 Simple Charts

Hayes Brown, an editor at ThinkProgress.org and a blogger conducted a research dedicated to the kidnap of more than 200 girls from the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Chibok, located in Nigeria's northeast Borno state by militants from the terrorist group commonly known as Boko Haram on April 14, 2014.




The research is based on 5 Goggle trends charts. Here's only the part of the article that may be interesting for Nigerian readers:

The girls are still missing. Their mothers still protest in Nigeria's capital. International assistance is flowing into the country to aid in the search. Despite that, the interest in the plight of the nearly three hundred school-aged girls taken over two months ago has plummeted since the story first became the latest cause célèbre on the Internet. It's a common enough assumption as to become cliche that interest in news stories, barring large flashy developments, tends to fade over time.


But the data backs up that idea, particularly in the case of the story of the three hundred girls from the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Chibok, located in Nigeria's northeast Borno state.

According to the data, that interest lasted for roughly a week before sharply dropping to the levels seen today. Since the kidnapping finally made its way into the international press, the story has been shared and tracked on social media through the hashtag "#BringBackOurGirls, serving almost as a brand for the abduction, an easy way to refer to the complex situation unraveling.

Google offers a service called Google Trends which can be used to examine how many people worldwide search for given terms compared to other points over a certain period. Plugging #BringBackOurGirls into Google Trends, modeling the last 90 days of search traffic, shows a surge of interest in the term peaking on Fri. May 9, before a sharp drop-off the following Monday.