A look at 10 of some of the most powerful Twitter hashtags over the last decade

Mar 21, 2016 | News

Sam Juric

As the founders of Twitter don their party hats in celebration of a decade in the social media world, the platform has helped influence some of the largest social and political movements across the globe.

“The way that Twitter can link to other stories, to other ideas and videos…it is very effective in spreading ideas transnationally which is always a good thing,” said Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of journalism at University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus. 

However, despite the social media platform’s merits in propelling social movement’s into the consciousness of the general public,  it also has it’s weak points, Dvorkin told Humber News.

“The problem is that it’s not going to be uninvented, we are going to have to learn to live with it and figure out how it can be more useful to journalism and finding out what people are thinking,” Dvorkin said.

He added the Arab Spring is a perfect example of the some of the faults of Twitter as a political platform.

“For those of us in the west we watched the Arab Spring unfold on Twitter and Facebook and had a sense that something powerful was about to happen,” he said. “But the Arab Spring was a failure. It gave journalists, especially in the West, the illusion that the digital culture was going to be transformative and had the exact opposite effects.”

From civil rights to marriage equality, the social media titan’s ability to mobilize and connect people on the most urgent issues over the last decade is undeniable. Here are just ten Twitter hashtags in review, selected by Humber News: