Could Anyone Have Predicted That # Askjameis Would Go Horribly Wrong

2263 Words10 Pages

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have become common jargon in today’s world. These social media services have become a core of many individuals online experience. Our society has grown increasingly dependent on social media as a way to confidently gain knowledge about current events. This increasing confidence has led the way to the use of hashtags to effectively spread information in an organized and systematic manner across social media. A Pew Research Center article from 2013, found that 74% of adults have a social media account. The large majority of individual are online and now what is being discussed online has become increasingly important. News organizations have used social media as a new way to reach their audience outside of the traditional news cycles. With social media, news can and does occur with reporting during every second of the day. Of the 74% of adults online, 71% of those have a Facebook (PEW RESEARCH CENTER 2013). Additionally, 23% of adults use Twitter and 26% of adults use Instagram (PEW RESEARCH CENTER 2013). These huge leaps between Facebook and Twitter and …show more content…

In the article, “How Could Anyone Have Predicted that #AskJameis Would Go Horribly Wrong? Public Relations, Social Media, and Hashtag Hijacking,” Sanderson et. al. addresses another instance of hashtag hijacking that occurred in 2014 after a public relations campaign for Florida State University. One of the key problems of hashtags and creating non-organic hashtags or hashtags that are created with the purpose of promoting an event or person is the potential of creating a problem. In the article, it clearly points to a common problem of not being in touch with the users of social media for a reason why hashtag hijacking occurs (Sanderson et. al. 2016). Understanding the environment that the hashtag is being created helps in gaining an understanding as to why some hashtags become more popular than