#HNNImpact #BringBackOurGirls The HASHTAG WAR. How Obiageli Ezekwesili (@obyezeks) said 4 words that IMPACTED the globe!

Can #BringBackOurGirls help in the fight against Boko Haram in Nigeria, or is it just causing distraction?

The ongoing nightmare of nearly 300 girls kidnapped in Nigeria by militants from the group Boko Haram is now an international concern, and the social media campaign #BringBackOurGirls, is receiving much of the credit. Now, on Twitter, a Los Angeles filmmaker is being accused of taking that credit after she appeared on national news to discuss her #BringBackOurGirls Facebook campaign.

In TV appearances, director Ramaa Mosley was credited by hosts with creating the #BringBackOurGirls hashtags, and she’s accused by dozens of Twitter users of attempting to benefit monetarily from the viral campaign. The anger has extended even to Mosley’s Wikipedia page, where a section titled #BringBackOurGirls was added to her profile on the open-edit encyclopedia Thursday.

Shared hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter, #BringBackOurGirls has been adopted by humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International and UNICEF in their own campaigns to bring attention to Nigeria’s ongoing human rights crisis. On Thursday, Michelle Obama shared her photo holding a #BringBackOurGirls sign in a tweet signed “mo” to indicate she typed it personally. It’s been retweeted more than 49,000 times.

Thanks to the prevalence of social media tracking tools, the provenance of #BringBackOurGirls is easily tracked to its first use on April 23, by Ibrahim Abdullahi, a corporate lawyer in Abuja, Nigeria.

Oby with sign down and women protesters in Abuja

He, however, credits the phrase to Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank for the Africa region and a senior advisor on Africa Economic Development Policy for the Open Society Foundations, who said those four words in a TV appearance.

"I never claimed to have originated hashtag #BringBackOurGirls," Mosley told NBC News. "I didn't even know how hashtags worked. I heard the voices of Onbiageli Ezekwesili, and Ibrahim Abdullahi, and I knew that in Nigeria that the story was being told but it wasn't being told in the United States and Europe."

Mosley says she launched the #BringBackOurGirls Facebook page, which now has more than 98,000 members, to "echo what they were saying." She added that she is in no way benefiting monetarily from her activism.

Ellis notes that Mosley has never claimed credit for the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, but would have served the cause better had she corrected the TV hosts who did give her credit, both during interviews and on Twitter. Eventually Mosley credited Ezekwesili via her Twitter account, but it was after the critical tweets began.

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