Public sentiment these days is measured in hashtags and social media trends; in likes, comments, retweets and shares. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and a number of blogging platforms, everyone now has a voice and the ability to air their many views. While there are downsides to this, this has also democratized the news to a large extent. We look at what was important for netizens all over the world this last one year. Let's recap few of the top trending hashtags of 2017:
The #MeToo hashtag was trending globally for a long time following the Harvey Weinstein Hollywood scandal. This was a call to women and men to come forward with their stories of harassment or trauma. These were survivor stories that helped some find closure and others find clarity about concepts such as consent, misogyny and more.
The Twitter-happy President of the United States is famous for expressing his anger, paranoia, ignorance and more via his tweets. Sometimes he fabricates entirely new words – such as Covfefe – presumably because he cannot seem to complete a thought and possibly fell asleep mid-tweet; tweet with a nonsense word that may or may not have been a spelling error. Needless to say, Twitter rose to the occasion beautifully.
Colin Kaepernick is an NFL Player who as a mark of protest against police brutality and racial discrimination, would not rise for the national anthem. Donald Trump called him a ‘son of a bitch’. Kaepernick's mother tweeted pithily "then I am a bitch". To protest against the President’s comments and to support a citizen's constitutional right to protest, other players rallied together by ‘taking a knee’ and/or locking arms; NFL authorities and even army veterans chose to #TakeAKnee and tweeted in support.
This hashtag is related to the Iranian election debates and was used a huge number of times by the people of Iran. This despite the fact that the microblogging platform is banned in the country!
In Jordan, a bizarre law permitted rapists to escape punishment if they married their victims. This law was scrapped. Twitter was delighted!
This hashtag trended to protest an offensive remark by a Brazilian TV (the country with the second largest black population in the world) presenter, William Waack. He was preparing for a live shot while covering the presidential campaign in the United States. Reacting to loud honking from a nearby car, he apparently quipped under his breath, “It’s a black thing. No doubt.” The video though surfaced much later, but the reactions were instant. Some tweets were funny, some incisive, some inspirational.
The war-torn country of Yemen faced a cholera outbreak. This prompted one news channel to create the #YemenInquiryNow hashtag to raise awareness for the outbreak, as well as the food crisis created by a blockade by Saudi multinationals.
This was actually initiated as a propaganda exercise by the country’s communist party but it caught on so well that it garnered over 2 million uses on Sina Weibo (China's answer to Twitter which is banned there). Obviously, there are various reasons to love (or not love) China.
This tweet by Carter Wilkerson was retweeted over three million times and garnered almost a million likes.
12 of the 30 most retweeted tweets were by the members of the band, One Direction.
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