Tweeting celebrities have become a staple source of entertainment for the digital savvy, so much so that the latest celebrity charitable movement has famous names giving up their twitter accounts for a cause. The project, called Digital Life Sacrifice, has big time famous tweeters from Alica Keys to Lady Gaga to Justin Timberlake going dark online until a million dollars has been raised for Alicia Key’s charity, Keep A Child Alive.
The entertainers plan to sign off all of their social media platforms on Wednesday, December first, World AIDS Day. They’ll be back when Keep A Child Alive passes the one million dollar fundraising mark. ”It’s really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on,” Keys said in a phone interview with the AP from New York last week.
In honor of the project, participants like Usher, Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams, Janelle Monae and Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz have filmed “last tweet and testament” videos and will appear in an ad campaign that shows them lying in coffins to represent what the campaign calls their digital deaths.
“It’s so important to shock you to the point of waking up,” Keys told the AP. “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. Keys alone has more than 2.6 million followers on Twitter.
“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?” Leigh Blake, the president and co-founder of Keep a Child Alive told the AP.
If you’d like to donate, the campaign will be accepting donations through text message and bar code technology.
