Facebook Cartoons: Child Abuse or Free Advertising for Cartoon Network?

Within the past week, millions of facebook users have been encouraged to put their favorite cartoon as their profile picture supposedly to "support and raise awareness" about child abuse. This facebook page encourages users to change their profile picture to a cartoon and links to the official site of the NSPCC children’s charity, urging visitors to donate to organizations battling child abuse. The problem? The NSPCC did not support such a campaign.

It turns out the campaign originated from an annual Cartoon Network marketing campaign that encourages Facebook users to change their profile photo to an animated character during the fourth week of November. The conspiracy theories get pretty thick from pedophiles behind the push so that younger children will accept friend requests to a bad taste marketing campaign by cartoon network.

Either way, the movement is doing absolutely nothing to help the victims of abuse or to raise awareness. Lets all change our profile pictures in order to raise awareness about blindness; it'd be about as effective. This is kind of blind and unuseful support for a cause we don't know much about is reminiscent of a classic Office episode. The motivations for such campaigns are suspect, and it's a nice gesture and all, but also a very empty.