I found love in a hopeless place. Yeah, some would argue that a Twitter hashtag is something terrible. They can be manipulated by bots and trolls. They can be hijacked by angry users. They can be just all around strange.The hashtag's intended purpose what Chris Messina pitched to Twitter in 2007 was to bring people together. They do, my relationship being a case in point. I won't bore you with all of the details, but TL; DR TechCrunch's annual conference uses the hashtag TCDisrupt and including those 10 characters in a tweet is how I met my friend turned significant other. But a recent study reminded me that hashtags are not always something that inspire love between internet users. Rather, they can be destructive. Kate Starbird, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, and her colleagues investigated how tweets divided us in the discourse around BlackLivesMatter. The paper published this year showed how Russian bots and trolls used those hashtags to further polarize the conversation. Hate speech and violence can have their own hashtags, as well. For one extreme example, ISIS spread propaganda via organized hashtag campaigns. The terrorist organization used the hashtag Stevens Head In Obamas Hands ahead of the beheading of American journalist Steven Sotloff. Have hashtags done more harm than good? That's hard to quantify, but they are powerful tools that anyone from a tech journalist to a militant leader can employ for attention. I'm not advocating for an end to hashtags, but I think it's important to understand what their purpose is and how the social networks and their users can fight against being manipulated. We shouldn't end hashtags, but we shouldn't let them destroy us. "Hashtags' best feature is also their most deadly bug the fact that anyone can use a hashtag," said Gina Trapani, director of engineering for software design studio Postlight. "Hashtags make it easy for any spammer to add so much noise to popular topics they render themselves useless." Politicians have used hashtags to rally constituents, but it's not always the supporters that receive the most attention since anybody can exploit one. When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced his presidential run in June 2015 he tweeted his campaign hashtag #TellingItLikeItIs. But rather than responding with congratulations, Twitter users vented their frustrations with Christie's policies on pensions for teaches and taxes in New Jersey. They even took aim at his physical appearance. Yeah, they were telling it like it is, just probably not how Christie imagined it. Other hashtags can start a positive movement. We've seen that with #MeToo and #TimesUpbattling sexual harassment in Hollywood and beyond. We saw it with #DeleteUber in regards to the decisions made by the ride-hailing company. My former colleagues and I created the hashtag #IBTWTF to publicly air our grievances after our company failed to pay severance and more. But has the value of these connections gone down?