A Research Agenda for Distributed Hashtag Spoiling: Tails of a Survived Trending Hashtag

Abstract

During some rounds of nuclear negotiations between the world powers and Iran, we noticed a situation in which some Twitter users were seemingly trying to disengage people from the flow of latest news about the most trending negotiation's hashtag, "#IranTalks". We recorded and sampled the tweets containing this hashtag on a random basis. We then marked the disengaging tweets based on some criteria and recorded the accounts responsible for these tweets in a list. Then, we applied social and organizational network analysis techniques and found strong evidence for the existence of a networked organization through which the accounts responsible for such tweeting behavior are connected. We believe the results of this study can stimulate more research about this social and organizational phenomenon and its possible impacts.