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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
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
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