Abstract
Social media has changed the way we engage in social activities. On Twitter, users can participate in social movements using hashtags such as #MeToo; this is known as hashtag activism. However, while these hashtags can help reshape social norms, they can also be used maliciously by spammers or troll communities for other purposes, such as signal boosting unrelated content, making a dent in a movement, or sharing hate speech. We present a Tweet-level hashtag hijacking detection framework focusing on hashtag activism. Our weakly-supervised framework uses bootstrapping to update itself as new Tweets are posted. Our experiments show that the system adapts to new topics in a social movement, as well as new hijacking strategies, maintaining strong performance over time.
Highlights
Social media has changed the way we live, trade, share news, and engage in social activities
Twitter is one of the most popular social networks, where users post short textual messages called “Tweets.” A hashtag (#) before a particular keyword or phrase in a Tweet is used to categorize the Tweet, helping users find topics that are of interest to them
Some popular hashtag activism movements include “#MeToo,” a movement against sexual harassment and assault, and “#BlackLivesMatter,” which campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards African Americans
Summary
Social media has changed the way we live, trade, share news, and engage in social activities. Twitter is one of the most popular social networks, where users post short textual messages called “Tweets.” A hashtag (#) before a particular keyword or phrase in a Tweet is used to categorize the Tweet, helping users find topics that are of interest to them. Yang (2016) defines hashtag activism as large numbers of social media posts using a common hashtagged phrase with a social or political claim. Some popular hashtag activism movements include “#MeToo,” a movement against sexual harassment and assault, and “#BlackLivesMatter,” which campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards African Americans. These hashtags help engage people in social movements by raising awareness on a larger scale and by giving opportunities for those with access limitations, like the physically challenged, to participate
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