Social media between natural freedoms and the requirements of security

The death of the hashtag Is the era of hashtags over?

What are the reasons for the recent decline in the popularity of hashtags on social media? How can this technology be used in the best possible way?

At the beginning of the emergence of social media, hashtags were one of its most important techniques for conducting digital campaigns and facilitating access to the required content among thousands of diverse publications, but it seems that this technology is declining recently.

The English word Hashtag first became part of the public consciousness in 2009, but it gained momentum and began spreading around 2011, coinciding with its prosperity on Twitter in particular, to become one of the stable search words on Google, according to statistics from "Google Trends". .

Gradually, the Instagram platform extracted the hashtag feature from Twitter, and over the past two years, the word "hashtag" became the most searched word on Instagram worldwide, followed by Twitter, and then Facebook the least used for this technology.

Starting in 2017, the popularity of hashtags on Twitter in particular, the home of digital campaigns and "trends", has steadily declined, becoming less than 40 percent of use as of October last year, according to the American magazine "Forbes", while indicating A recent study found that half of online shoppers have stopped using hashtags to facilitate their access to commercial campaigns.

What are the causes of slow death of the hashtag?

At first, hashtags appeared as a way to organize the massive content on social media platforms, as it was enough to write a hashtag related to any topic you are interested in, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to reach everything related to this topic from publications, photos, ads, etc.

The hashtags enabled digital campaigns, regardless of their goal, political, social or commercial, to reach the largest possible number of audience and not be restricted to only limited followers, and this helped in the beginning to gather and mobilize people to serve a specific goal through the means of communication, and to highlight a specific topic to become In the circle of great interest through what is known as "the trend industry".

But recently, things are no longer going the same way, as some parties or users have resorted to exploiting the hashtags that have gained wide popularity, to promote goods unrelated to the topic of the tag, or to put it as a target for bots and fake accounts to distract followers from the topic and reduce its popularity.

In addition to placing the “hashtag” as a target for what is known as “electronic flies”, a group of fake or real targeted accounts, which aim to carry out a counter-campaign by broadcasting recorded messages contrary to the content of the hashtag, which affects the course of the campaign, or leads to the reluctance of followers to participate .

While the main goal of hashtags was to regulate internet noise and focus its content, these interferences turned into additional noise, which frustrated many followers and looked for other ways to interact.

In addition, improving the intelligence of social media algorithms has made it easier for users to access the content they want, without the need to search for it through a specific “hashtag.” Sometimes it is enough to discuss with your friend a topic, or tell him you want to buy a specific product Until you find thousands of posts and ads on the same topic, before you even start searching.

What is the best way to use hashtags?

In light of the constant decline of tags, experts advise several means to use them in the best possible way, until the emergence of a new technology that replaces them and plays its role in a more effective way, as it always happens in the world of technology.

First, the use of more than three hashtags in a single post should be avoided, and it is preferable to focus on one, to avoid counter-posts and minimize them as much as possible.

Second, it is imperative that the tag contains a keyword and as few words as possible. Tags that contain a long phrase, or include more than one hub, distract followers and allow bots and fake accounts to penetrate them more easily.

Third, the less you choose a hash of popularity, the higher the likelihood that you will reach a larger real audience. The popularity of the hashtag reaches a certain degree of popularity and then its effective content stops due to the overlapping and exploitation of posts by spread seekers by introducing topics that are not related to the main topic, and this leads to users’ frustration The message is lost before it reaches them.

Fourth, focusing on the content itself and carefully crafting the post has become the first attraction, and thus spread, and not relying on attaching the hashtag to the post only as it was in the past.

Fifth, taking care of direct communication with the first circle of loyal followers, whether individuals or masses, and ensuring that the message is delivered to them personally and then they automatically publish it in their own circles. This method ensures obtaining a loyal and real audience.

Sixth and finally, the use of external links and their attachment to the publications of the usual means of communication. External links have extracted methods of classification and search on the Internet for the first time from the hashtags this year, which indicates that it is still a more effective and attractive method.

Social media between natural freedoms and the requirements of security

At the "International Strategic Communication Summit" organized by the Turkish Presidency Communication Department in Istanbul, President Erdoğan expressed his country's keenness to deal more firmly with social media platforms because of their role in spreading false news and their contribution to disinformation campaigns.

It was remarkable in Erdogan's speech that he linked communication with the military and defense aspects, considering them among the strategic issues that should not be relied upon on external parties.

What President Erdogan is alluding to in this talk is that Turkey, which over the past two decades has been able to reduce its dependence on the outside in armaments operations, has become convinced of the need to move towards reducing dependence on the outside in communications issues, especially cross-border social media platforms. In the words of the president, “Since we are not completely dependent on foreigners in defense industry and military affairs, we cannot leave the issue of communications to others.” "Like other strategic issues, we have to take matters relating to media and communication into our own hands," he added.

President Erdoğan linked media and communication issues with strategic issues, which is a reflection of the global awareness that is being formed about the danger posed by social media platforms in national security issues. The so-called fifth generation wars, or hybrid wars, which have become immersed in the media at the heart of the tools they resort to to achieve strategic goals in the fields of defense and war, which is to rob the enemy or opponent of the sources of his power and make him in the battle in a state of confusion unable to take the right decisions, which reduces From its effectiveness in response or deterrence operations.

Media manipulation through social media platforms, which includes many phenomena of information conflict such as false news, disinformation, and propaganda, has become part of some defensive literature and falls under the category of sharp power, through which governments achieve their goals by using one of the soft power tools to achieve a goal Solid. Depriving the enemy or opponent of their sources of power is a hard goal, and in this case, social media is used, which is a soft tool to achieve it in many cases.

We have seen plenty of evidence to prove this, it is enough to look at the 2016 US elections and the inauguration of former President Donald Trump, the Cambridge Analytica scandals, and the Brexit elections. This is in addition to Macron’s leaks in the French elections in 2017, the massacre of mosques in New Zealand in which dozens of innocent worshipers were killed by a white racist right-wing extremist who broadcast the massacre live on Facebook in a simulation of an electronic game, ethnic cleansing campaigns in Burma, and repeated attacks On Muslims in India, in which misinformation campaigns played a major role.

Turkey itself has suffered from many media manipulation campaigns targeting both its domestic front and its foreign policy. Turkey was used as a material in the Brexit elections to intimidate the danger of migrants, as well as portraying its assistance to the Libyan government during Haftar's attack to occupy the capital, Tripoli, as an external invasion and not as assistance that it carried out at the request of the internationally recognized government, the government of Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj at the time.

All this has entailed what has become a global outcry about the danger that this phenomenon, that is, the phenomenon of media manipulation, poses to democracy and human rights. This is what President Erdogan emphasized in his speech, as he considered that these platforms, which were initially considered a refuge for freedom advocates from the grip of authoritarian regimes, later became a tool in sabotaging awareness and depriving a large segment of people from enjoying a clean media environment from which they obtain their information and news in a normal way away from Distortion of false news and other media pests. In his speech, Erdogan stressed that the Turkish government is trying "to protect its people, especially the vulnerable groups in society, from lies and misinformation without violating the right of our citizens to receive accurate and impartial information."

In this regard, the Turkish government intends to enact new legislation that imposes more censorship on social media platforms towards combating the phenomenon of media manipulation. According to Turkish media reports, the new legislation will punish the dissemination of "disinformation" and "false news" with imprisonment of up to five years. It will also establish a regulator for social media. Last year, the Turkish government passed a law requiring social media platforms with more than one million users to maintain a legal representative on Turkish soil and store data in the country. Since then, major social media companies, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have set up offices in Turkey. The data, according to the Turkish government, is no longer just digital clicks, but rather has become a strategic asset that must be preserved within the sovereign borders of the state and prevent its violation by external forces.

Naturally, these steps raised the concerns of freedom of expression defenders, as there is a fear that government measures, whether in Turkey or other countries, towards imposing more censorship on social media platforms, would undermine freedom of expression. It is a legitimate fear, as we live in a real dilemma between freedom of expression and the requirements of security.

This is what US President Barack Obama previously turned to following the Snowden leaks scandal, when he admitted that the requirements of national security impose restrictions on some freedoms, including freedom of expression. According to the theorists of the Hobbesian school, giving up some natural rights in exchange for maintaining security is one of the pillars of the social contract of the modern state based on national sovereignty.

It is too early to judge the ability of governments to reconcile some freedoms, such as freedom of expression, with the requirements of national security, which includes the security of the individual according to the new definitions of the concept of security. But what has become certain is the need to take strict steps towards the phenomenon of media manipulation because of its fundamental repercussions on our natural rights, including the right to access real information. The manipulation of the truth, and the production of the false, also infringes on one of our most fundamental natural rights. It goes without saying that the false truth has become a tangible reality, which has prompted many dictionaries to introduce the term post-truth to describe the era in which we currently live.(Bashar Zuaiter)