Sometimes to deliver the message it’s more effective say something once and then become silent than keep on chatting and tweeting about it all the time. The celebrities including Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Jennifer Hudson, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams and many more decided to sign off their social media accounts on December 1, World AIDS Day, to support a new campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice on behalf of Alicia Keys’s charity, Keep a Child Alive. They will get back online when the organization raises $1 million.
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This is probably the first time Facebook and Twitter will ‘participate’ in a social project in such a unconventional way—by literally not getting involved at all—and the goal is definitely worth losing some most-heavily followed names for some time. The campaign will officially launch on Wednesday with a series of so-called “last tweet and testament” videos and prints, featuring celebrities lying in coffins. This symbolizes their digital death, but people can turn them alive by donating to the charity through the dedicated website www.buylife.org. Internet users can either send a text message, thus giving $10, or specify the sum on the page and pay with a credit card. These celebrities have millions fans on social media websites (for example, Lady Gaga attracted nearly 24 million friends on Facebook and over 7 million followers on Twitter), so campaign initiators along with the entertainers are waiting for a huge response.
Keep a Child Alive collects money for buying medicine, which will be given to people with HIV/AIDS in Africa and India. But not just that—the organization provides residents of deprived communities in these regions with essential nutrition, shelter, support and education. To keep a child alive you are expected to keep the parents alive, too. The philosophy of the charity is build on the notion that buying the ability to live is just a part of the whole thing—to buy the dignity that is life is what they really want to achieve.
“It’s really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on. It’s so important to shock you to the point of waking up. It’s not that people don’t care or it’s not that people don’t want to do something, it’s that they never thought of it quite like that. This is such a direct and instantly emotional way and a little sarcastic, you know, of a way to get people to pay attention,” said Keys, the co-founder of the charity.
“We’re trying to sort of make the remark: Why do we care so much about the death of one celebrity as opposed to millions and millions of people dying in the place that we’re all from?” continued Leigh Blake, the president and co-founder of Keep a Child Alive.