A 2014 study led by Dr. Kurt Gray from UNC Chapel Hill analyzed the Save Darfur Facebook page. More than 1.17 million members had indicated they were concerned and wanted to offer support in some way to the horrific events in Darfur. The team only had the resources to examine the first 100,000 members. To their surprise, they discovered that 99.8 percent of those who liked the page had never donated to the cause and 72 percent had not recruited anyone in their social media circles.

Dr. Gray commented on the research: "They raised almost nothing compared with what a similar campaign would have raised offline. The reason is that you got to look great without having to pay." Gray compares this to eating junk food: "It's the equivalent of refined foods. It's engineered to make us like it, but it's ultimately empty." Gray concluded:

Despite the chorus of voices touting the transformative … potential of social media, when it came to recruiting for—and donating to—the Save Darfur Cause, the most popular social network site in the world appears to have hardly mattered … Although it enabled more than 1 million individuals to register their discontent with the situation in Darfur, it largely failed to transform these initial acts … into a deep and sustained commitment to the work.