If you’ve been using Facebook much over the past week or so you’ve probably noticed that many of your friends’ profile photos have been replaced with pictures of cartoon characters. Don’t worry, this isn’t some online invasion from Toonland, it’s a viral campaign to promote the fight against child abuse.
However, as with all of the great viral campaigns, nobody knows who actually started this one. It wasn’t started by any of the children’s charities, with even the NSPCC claiming no knowledge of its origin (although they are very happy with the results of the campaign).
Whoever began this Facebook campaign is keeping very silent, enjoying the fruits of their success from afar – and success it surely has been. Facebook users from all over the world have been swapping their profile photos for pictures of their favourite cartoon characters, with old Hasbro classics such as My Little Pony and Transformers proving very popular.
In fact, the unofficial campaign was so popular that, according to the LA Times at least, cartoon characters and old cartoon shows dominated the top online searches this past weekend – so even SEO has been affected.
The campaign asked for people to swap their profile photos and copy the following message into their Facebook status:
“Change your FB picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The goal is not to see a human face on FB until Monday (Dec 6th) Join the fight against child abuse & copy and paste to your status!”
Did you change your profile picture?
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