Hashtags - Connecting Conversations Together

Hashtags provide a surefire way to connect information on social media search results. As a protocol, it functions effectively well for linking together people’s conversations in the public sphere. This is used effectively enough in the advocacy domain to keep conversations about the public and private partnership’s many agendas going. There are arguments and disagreements marked with the same hash-tags to be reviewed, which fills gaps that others new to the subject may have in their knowledge. Hashtags can allow people to generate in the minds of others a reaction that will take place online and offline, and to think about a particular subject as being a certain way due to online claims featuring hashtags. I think that the hashtag is an effective tool for political activism in that messages can be spread and linked very quickly throughout the public-sphere, bringing people together through information circulation. It is also useful when searching for discourse because it helps to narrow down information into contextualized bits and pieces used to extract and create a fragmented understanding of a topic. Hashtags are an effective way of organizing discourse online so that people can independently contribute to discussions. Unfortunately there are some downsides to hashtags. Hashtags can only be as effective as the writers who identify with the message behind the symbol, and what they and their audience actually do to act on the message, if the message seems to suggest a call to action. In this, people are invited to continue spreading the call to action, so that they may feel like they are participating in politics. Hashtags may create a more fragmented democracy where the people don’t actually participate in “law by and for the people” in the legislative process and judicial process. The people become protracted in the circulation of communicative capitalism, where media conglomerates rule. Another big downside could be that false claims made on the Internet on social media using hashtags can spread misinformation, but there is a silver lining to this argument. Even though this is true, we should not censor what we consider “false information” that has gained traction through hashtags, as many suggest in the media today. This would only stifle one’s strategy of determining truth. For example, take a judicial case. Prosecutors could show a jury that the defendant is lying through collecting and comparing the defendant’s testimony, and asking the defendant to recount specific details that the prosecutor thinks the defendant is lying about before the jury to see if newly falsified information will be said that contradicts evidence and testimony. Of course, evidence or testimony can be removed before and not allowed at trial if a request from the defense is determined to be necessary in protecting the rights of the defendant. In effect, censoring or policing “false information” eliminates the ability to compare truthful contradictory information presented beside any previously introduced falsity. Generally, the more information exposure, the better, even if a lie can spread halfway around the world faster than the truth. That will only make truth-bombs even more explosive in the end. Think of the people at Twitter today who abdicate to police information because they don’t want people to “get misinformed”. Unfortunately then their users are subjected to the accuracy of the “Twitter police” which sometimes are even just algorithms, to identify and filter information, instead of letting users be able to decide for themselves what is true and what is not. This reduces the effectiveness of hashtags obviously, since only certain people are going to get siloed on social media that censor content. Echo chambers will form. Overall, even through these issues of censorship, hashtags remain an important part in organizing political discourse on social media websites for users to access and contribute to larger discussions with others on political activism.