The Trending-Hashtag Battle

Abstract

The utilization of social networking platforms (SNPs) for online activism has become quite widespread in recent years. Hashtag activism, in particular, has gained more prominence given hashtag’s ability to facilitate the formation of an online large-scale assembly where all users can engage with the same topic in a more collective-action manner. Full-scale authoritarian regimes – with neither viable channels for opposition nor independent political forms of civil society – were especially alarmed of this type of activism. In response, full-authoritarian regimes have censored controversial hashtags by coordinatively overwhelming the discursive environment of these hashtags with more favorable posts. However, this hashtag-hijacking strategy is likely to increase netizens’ awareness of controversial hashtags along with other costly repercussions, and it is also not reflective of the ongoing progress towards more subtle forms of censorship inside these regimes. In this paper I undertake a case study to evaluate whether the strategy of how censors deal with controversial hashtags have moved beyond what the current literature offers us and, if so, what possibly have influenced this shift in strategy. The findings of this paper reveal that (i) controversial hashtags are more likely to be subtly suppressed from the trending list than to be directly flooded with progovernment or counternarrative posts and that (ii) the trending list predominantly consists of inflated entertainment-related hashtags. When compared to hashtag hijacking, the current strategy makes netizens less likely to come across controversial hashtags, consume its content, and mobilize behind it. The findings of this paper present further evidence that we are moving farther away from Diamond and Plattner’s (2012) early argument of SNPs being a “liberation technology”.