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

Hayes Brown, an editor at Think Progress 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.
Interest over time. Web Search. Worldwide, Past 90 days.
View full report in Google
Trends
The hashtag originated in Nigeria roughly two weeks after the
girls' kidnapping. Searches for the hashtag on Google
skyrocketed the third week of the girls' kidnapping. A drop-
off in interest into the hashtag doesn't necessary mean that
interest in the story writ large is also falling. As a way to
minimize the chances of that, ThinkProgress also ran a query
for the term "Nigeria girls," a simple shorthand for the story.
The results are similar in terms of a clear peak followed by a
substantial drop-off in interest.
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN