Hashtag hijacking
Seizing a hashtag, keyword, or search term associated with an opponent or a cause and flooding it with unrelated, hostile, or drowning content, so that the original conversation is captured or made unfindable.
A hashtag is a public room with no door. Anyone can post into it, and whoever posts most decides what the room contains. The device takes a tag built for one purpose, a brand campaign, a protest, a news event, and fills it with another: mockery that turns a campaign into a joke, spam that buries a protest, counter-messaging that makes a movement's own tag carry its opponents' claims. Searchers for the original find the hijack.
The corporate version, in which a brand's promotional tag is turned against it, has been called "bashtagging" since McDonald's #McDStories in 2012. The state version, in which activists' tags are flooded with noise, is censorship by noise aimed at a keyword. Exploits Availability Heuristic and the platforms' open tagging.
Historical examples
The New York Police Department asked users in April 2014 to post photographs with officers under #myNYPD; the tag was taken over within hours by images of police violence and arrests from the department's history. Studies of the episode traced how a tag's meaning is determined by whoever posts into it most, not by whoever created it.
Jackson, Sarah J., and Brooke Foucault Welles. "Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics." Journal of Communication 65, no. 6 (2015): 932–952. Source
Twitter's 2019 disclosure of a state-backed network removed for targeting the Hong Kong protests, and later analyses of spam accounts posting travel scenery into tags used by Uyghur activists and researchers, documented the state form: a tag associated with dissent drowned by volume so that searchers found landscapes instead of testimony.
Twitter Safety. "Information Operations Directed at Hong Kong." 19 August 2019; Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Strange Bedfellows on Xinjiang: The CCP, Fringe Media and US Social Media Platforms. Canberra: ASPI, 2021.
In advertising and commerce
McDonald's promoted #McDStories in January 2012 to collect happy customer anecdotes, and within hours the tag filled with accounts of food poisoning, labor complaints, and jokes; the company withdrew the promotion the same day. The episode named the corporate form, "bashtagging," and became the case every social-media guide cites.
Hill, Kashmir. "#McDStories: When a Hashtag Becomes a Bashtag." Forbes, 24 January 2012.
Find a hashtag from a recent protest or campaign. Read the newest fifty posts. How many are about the original subject?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
The airline's #FlyWithUs tag is now a catalog of lost-luggage stories and delays; the campaign was pulled by lunchtime.
What to notice. A promotional tag captured by the public it was aimed at; the open room filled with the wrong content.
The protest hashtag is full of new accounts posting scenery and sport, and the eyewitness posts from this morning can't be found in it.
What to notice. A dissent tag drowned by volume, aimed at a keyword; censorship by noise is the family, hijacking the form.
Supporters of the ban post under the campaign-against-the-ban's own tag until the tag reads as an argument for it.
What to notice. A movement's tag made to carry its opponents' message.
Sources
- Jackson, Sarah J., and Brooke Foucault Welles. "Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics." Journal of Communication 65, no. 6 (2015): 932–952. doi:10.1111/jcom.12185
- Hill, Kashmir. "#McDStories: When a Hashtag Becomes a Bashtag." Forbes, 24 January 2012.
- Roberts, Margaret E. Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0691178868