#Hashtag?

            A few days ago, a spokesman for Twitter confirmed a purchase of a top trending hashtag by the Bernie Sanders Campaign. Sanders became the first 2016 presidential candidate to pay six-figures to “take over” a trending topic. So what exactly does it mean to take over a hashtag? It should be no surprise to anyone that social media sites make their money off advertisements. When a company wants its consumers to see its product, it can a pay a premium to have its content displayed more visibly. “Taking over” a hashtag, otherwise known as promoting a hashtag, allows a third party to choose which links users see when they click on the hashtag. In this case, the Sanders campaign chose a tweet from Mr. Sanders’ account that asks users to sign up to say good luck to the candidate. This isn’t the first time a hashtag was purchased during a presidential campaign. In the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama’s campaign purchased the hashtag #fourmoreyears. The Mitt Romney campaign fired back by paying to promote the hashtag #cantaffordfourmore.

            Think about what Twitter allows third parties to do. For the right price, anyone can essentially control the information that people see. The decisions that people make are highly correlated to the nature of their exposure to content. When information is withheld or hidden, it can be hard to make a bias choice. At first, I thought about how unfair it was to be able to promote posts on social media. Should third parties be allowed to control what people on social media can and cannot see? Then I thought to myself, “How is this any different from commercials?” Companies do this all the time. They pay money to have their content air on prime time slots. With the right price, a company can also control the information people see on TV. But I never considered them as violations of my right to information. I never considered them as tools to manipulate. But why did the same principle implemented through social media cause me to be defensive and spew claims of net neutrality?

            I’m probably not the first person to think about the morality of content promotion on social media. This, however, is no different from what companies have been doing for years. Having a new medium doesn’t change the underlying content, it just changes the way it moves. For whatever reason, whenever something has to do with social media, people feel more entitled to voice their opinion. Perhaps, it’s because they feel safe to do so; they have an outlet to feed their concerns as opposed to screaming at their TV because they saw a commercial they didn’t like. The symbiotic relationship people have with social media implies that social media has turned into its own living entity. Therefore, people will naturally defend the way that they can interact with it. This can lead to a dangerous divergence in how the same things are viewed on and off social media. Just as I initially saw fault in content promotion on Twitter and not in TV commercials, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between morality on the web and morality in the real world.