Social media was the go-to place during the Napa earthquake Sunday, with early first-hand accounts and timely emergency information. Of course, to find the right info, it didn t take much, just a good hashtag, like #napaquake.
But that hashtag and others related to the quake were also quickly adopted by people posting anti-American messages and slogans in support of ISIS, a militant organization in Syria and Iraq, as I wrote in a column on Sunday.
Social media sites like Twitter offer ways to report this sort of hashtag hijacking, but still the images of coffins draped in American flags were interspersed with ones of smashed Napa stores and crumpled roads.
What does a group gain by hashtag hijacking?
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, said hashtag hijacking is an old phenomenon. In politics, people taunt each other using their adversaries favorite hashtags, he said. It s also used by commercial spammers who track what s hot to promote their products or services.
Hashtag abuse would be surprising in this case because ISIS s use of social media has been sophisticated so far, he said. The organization has used social media to pitch its cause, appeal to young people and to recruit, according to The Guardian and other media.
#napaquake may not be average hashtag hijacking, he said.
Pro-ISIS types may pick up the earthquake hashtag because an earthquake fits with their own vision: a fulfillment of ISIS s threats that catastrophe or other disaster will befall the U.S.
Above: A damaged building in Napa after the Sunday 6.0 earthquake. ((Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
