BBC: Paris hits back at filthy streets hashtag campaign. “Paris officials have blamed a ‘political smear campaign’ after angry comments and pictures of filthy streets spread on social media criticising a ‘trashed Paris’. The hashtag ‘saccage Paris’ went viral over Easter, with many of the messages accusing the city’s Socialist leadership of ruining the capital.”
Lifehacker: How to Make Your Hashtags More Reader-Friendly. “Communicating in the language of hashtags is an annoyingly universal aspect of social media. But if you’re using hashtags on your Instagram posts, tweets, or Facebook status updates, you should make sure they’re readable for people with visual and cognitive disabilities.”
MakeUseOf: How to Mute Specific Words and Hashtags on Twitter. “Sometimes, Twitter can be an information overload—from bad news, to spammy trends, to content that you have no interest in engaging with. Luckily, it’s possible to tune your timeline and notifications to filter out harmful content or topics you’d rather not see on your timeline. Read on to learn how to mute tweets that contain particular words, phrases, usernames, emojis, or hashtags.”
Reuters: After Facebook ban, thousands in Myanmar take to Twitter to plead #RespectOurVotes. “Since Myanmar’s new military rulers imposed a temporary blockade on Facebook on Thursday, thousands in the Southeast Asian country have joined Twitter, according to app downloads and a Reuters estimate.”
UCLA: How a Twitter hashtag provides insights for doctors and support for people with breast cancer. “A UCLA-led review of nine years of social media posts with the hashtag #BCSM suggests that Twitter can be a useful resource not only for patients, but also for physicians and researchers. The hashtag — an initialism for ‘breast cancer social media’ — first appeared on Twitter in 2011. Created by two cancer survivors, it was used to curate a weekly informational chat for people with breast cancer. Dr. Deanna Attai became one of the group’s moderators a few weeks later.”
NBC News: QAnon accounts make a dent in voting discussion on Twitter. “More than 1 in 50 tweets about voting in the 2020 elections in August and September were posted by QAnon accounts, according to research released Friday by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit.”
WNCT: ECU students make #ShutDownECU Twitter account, #KeepECUOpen forms in response. “A Twitter account continues gaining popularity, urging [East Carolina University] to switch to remote learning. #ShutDownECU is made up of about 10 students, with a list of demands for the university. They all want to remain anonymous.”
Tech Transparency Project: Instagram’s Hashtag Blocking Favors Trump, Hurts Biden. “When a person searches Instagram for a hashtag and clicks on it, the platform has automatically generated “related hashtags” pointing users to other relevant content. TTP examined related hashtags for 20 popular terms associated with the Trump and Biden campaigns and found starkly different treatment of the two candidates. Instagram blocked the display of related hashtags on all 10 of the Trump hashtags reviewed, including #donaldtrump, #trump and #trump2020. That means users were not directed to other content, including anything negative or critical about the president. But for all 10 similar Biden hashtags, Instagram did display related hashtags, which at times steered users to insults and disinformation about the former vice president, with phrases like #creepyjoebiden, #joebidenpedophile and #joebidenisaracist.”
Global Voices: Nigerians counteract COVID-19 denialism with social media campaigns. “Nigerians are reducing the effect of COVID-19 denial narratives with powerful online Twitter campaigns such as #MyCOVID19NaijaStory and #COVIDStopswithMe. These counter-narratives aim to prove that the deadly coronavirus is not a hoax and more importantly, to encourage people to adopt good public health behaviours to mitigate its spread. As of July 29, Nigeria had recorded 41,804 confirmed COVID-19 cases,18,764 recoveries and 868 deaths.”
BBC: Banned protesters send #ZimbabweanLivesMatter viral. “Could a social media hashtag – tapping into the energy and anger of the global #BlackLivesMatter phenomenon – help achieve in Zimbabwe what years of street protests, strikes and political campaigns have so clearly failed to do? Over the last few days, in response to a particularly brutal, public, widespread, and on-going clampdown by security forces, the hashtag #ZimbabweanLivesMatter has gone viral, globally.”
Rolling Stone: TikTok Bans QAnon Hashtags. “A TikTok spokesperson told Rolling Stone such content contained disinformation, which is prohibited in the platform’s community guidelines, and confirmed that it was working to make QAnon-related content more difficult to find in its search function. TikTok will also be working to remove conspiracy theory-related videos and accounts, though some hashtags were still searchable on the platform as of this writing.”
BBC: Iran halts execution of three protesters after online campaign. “Iran has halted the executions of three men who were sentenced to death over anti-government protests last year, according to one of their lawyers. Babak Paknia told reporters that a request for a retrial had been accepted by the supreme court. The decision comes after a hashtag against their execution was used millions of times online.”
Evening Express: Aberdeen University shows off its assets with online #BestMuseumBum battle. “Staff Aberdeen University have polished their bums for an online museum battle. Started by Yorkshire Museum, today’s curator is calling on museums to showcase the best bums and bottoms from their collection. Starting the campaign was an image of a Roman marble statuette depicting ‘an athlete at the peak of fitness’.”
BuzzFeed News: Why Mundane Daily Twitter Hashtags Keep Trending During The Coronavirus Pandemic. “As a pandemic ravages the globe and the economy plummets like Dan Cortese in spandex shorts and a bungee cord, we are all desperately looking for some form of stability and normalcy. Luckily, you, a chronically online person, do not have to look far to find this tiny shred of pre-COVID-19 life that grounds us back in our base humanity. Just fire up Twitter before 10 a.m. and check the trending topics — chances are you will see the most banal and useless hashtags trend each morning: #MotivationMonday, #ThursdayThoughts, #FridayFeeling.”
Vice: Instagram Parents Are Documenting ‘Baby’s First Pandemic’. “As we all try to find levity by any means possible, some parents have turned to a new Instagram milestone: “baby’s first pandemic,” the hashtag for which has close to 1,300 associated Instagram posts as of this writing. (There’s also #myfirstpandemic.)”
