April Fools Rhetoric

The ONE Campaign does a weekly blog about their ONE Act a Week and this week's act was especially unique. Playing off of April Fools jokes, the ONE campaign sent out an email to all of its registered users with the headline that YouTube was banning cat videos from their site. That's right, videos of those cute little kittens getting into all kinds of silly situations that we all, some of us embarrassingly, like to watch would be banned from YouTube. Aghast by this prediction, members then clicked the link in the email and were directed to a different page on the ONE website with the headline "NEVER.GONNA.HAPPEN." YouTube would be dumb to ban kittens from their site, but one thing that the ONE campaign can confidently predict is that the "the beginning of the end of AIDS can happen... and by 2015!" This statement is followed by an arrow that directs viewers to sign the petition to congress to "Reverse budget cuts to the life-saving AIDS program PEPFAR and fulfill our commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria." I, of course, signed the petition. The Act of the Week asked ONE campaign supporters to make predictions like this to catch other's attention and lead them to this page to sign the petition. For example, after signing the petition, I tweeted the same headline about cats being banned from YouTube with the link provided by ONE that would take whoever clicked on the link directly to the petition page. Supporters were encouraged to make creative predictions that seemed absurd but always led back to this possible and crucial prediction of ending aids. The rhetorical appeals here used by the campaign allow supporters to be a part of the movement as well, and I admire their use of their resources, inexpensive and creative, through twitter, Facebook, and email.

Here is a video about the #ipredict campaign: