HashJacker- Detection and Analysis of Hashtag Hijacking on Twitter

Abstract

Social media has become a multi purpose platform where users tend to discuss their common topics of interest as well as utilise it for endorsement and campaigns.Twitter being one of the most widely used social media platforms,provides a mechanism known as Hashtag which enables diversified online users, having coinciding interests to connect with each other. Hashtagging a tweet provides the most effective way of promoting a content as it steadily acquires the reader's attention because of it's symbolic denotation.With increasing hits on a particular Hashtag, it comes under one of the "trending topics".Soon this trending topic becomes a line of sight for people using Twitter. Users tend to hijack these popular Hashtags for distributing unrelated content, spam, negative sentiments to tarnish the intended motive of Hashtag making its presence counter-productive. We propose a tool: HashJacker which detects and analyses hijacking of Hashtag tweets.Also, we have discussed best practises to circumvent wrecked Hashtag tweets.