Review of Popular Hashtag Movements on social media

Abstract

The concept of Hashtag is relatively common worldwide since the expansion of Digital media interfaces and growing use of Smartphones. As per 2020 report of Statista, the smartphone penetration has grown to million marks user base, and it is projected to grow even higher to hundred million in the coming years which simply means that the coming years are going to witness more digital interactions and networking. These days networking on social media is expanding to massive levels with the use of hashtags. The term Hashtag is used specifically on different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Users generally put hashtags to increase the reach of their posts or to determine or follow the trending topics, themes. It helps in discovering user specific content. The concept of Hashtag activism or movement refers to the act of gathering public support over internet platforms. It does not require mere sharing, liking or retweeting instead simply a common Hashtag is used with symbol “#” before the post. Such hashtags are further used by other netizens to spread the word about trending topics. In the present paper researcher has purposely selected a few Hashtag movements related to social issues. The purpose of this study is to identify and evaluate popular Hashtag movements in India. Nine Social Media Hashtags movements are purposively selected by the researcher to evaluate and discuss the significance of Hashtags.