Hijacking Pro-Putin Hashtags at the Start of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

The final day at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference begins with a paper by Wujiong Ren, who begins by highlighting the role of social media in accompanying international conflicts. He suggests that the Russian war against Ukraine is the first to fully combine physical and cyberwarfare.

One tool in this warfare is the tactic of hashtag hijacking, where malicious actors flood a hashtag in order to render it useless for genuine uses – and he says that this could represent a zero-sum calculation where hijackers and genuine users of the hashtag compete for public attention. Such hashtag hijacking has a longer history, also outside of global conflicts and in PR campaigns.

The present case examines the #IStandWithPutin hashtag, in February and March 2023, which contained some 326,000 English-language tweets over the course of three weeks. Of these, some 22% were identified by AI-based coding as representing hashtag hijacking by pro-Ukrainian actors that tried to subvert the originally pro-Putin message of the hashtag.

Hijacking tweets emerged later, in response to the wide visibility of the original hashtag; this did not lead to a decrease in the activity of pro-Putin accounts, however. There was no notable difference in botness between the hijacking and non-hijacking tweets, according to Botometer.

Attention to hijacking and non-hijacking tweets was also distributed broadly equally; this means that hijacking is not a zero-sum game after all: hashtag hijacking also draws further attention to the non-hijacked message of the hashtag. Hashtag hijacking is thus a new approach to gamifying public opinion.