Hashtag hijacking: What it is, why it happens and how to avoid it

Petros Xanthopoulos, Orestis Panos Panagopoulos, Georgios A. Bakamitsos and Elizabeth Freudmann

Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 2016, vol. 3, issue 4, 353-362

Abstract: Hashtag hijacking is a form of cyber content attack that arises in modern social media microblogging platforms. It occurs when a hashtag is used for a different purpose than the one originally intended, such as tagging messages with undesirable content and surfacing this content to a target audience. In marketing campaigns, hashtag hijacking can have a significant impact on a company’s brand and/or the success of a marketing campaign. Despite the practical importance of hashtag hijacking and its numerous citations in the popular media, there has been little academic literature dealing with this emerging topic. This paper presents a first study of this phenomenon from a practical yet academically oriented perspective. Namely, it provides (1) a taxonomical classification of the different types of hashtag hijacking attacks; (2) a socio-technical data-mining methodology for detecting it at an early stage; and (3) a proposed response strategy informed by the traditional marketing literature.

Keywords: social media; hashtag hijacking; Twitter; data mining; marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hstalks.com/article/4766/download/ (application/pdf)
https://hstalks.com/article/4766/ (text/html)
Requires a paid subscription for full access.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aza:jdsmm0:y:2016:v:3:i:4:p:353-362

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing from Henry Stewart Publications
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Henry Stewart Talks ().