2006: Emily at the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul
You may be seeing inspirational messages from celebrities and influencers with the hashtags #ChallengeAccepted or #WomenSupportingWomen accompanied by B&W images of the women themselves.
Although I'm sure the intention bears no ill-will, these posts inadvertently have co-opted a movement intended to bolster awareness and action about a human rights crisis in Turkey, specifically around horrific murders of women.
You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I'm Sephardic, and for generations, parts of my family lived (with many still living) in Turkey. This photo, inside the Hagia Sophia, is from my 2006 visit. In the past 10+ years, "violence against women has skyrocketed. More than 1,000 women have been officially killed in gender-based violence."
This post isn't intended to shame anyone who unintentionally redirected the campaign but rather to 1. remind people to do their due diligence before jumping onto a viral hashtag and 2. to give those who prematurely shared unrelated messages, to learn about the movement spawned by #PınarGültekin's murder and re-amplify with the message #TheRealChallengeAccepted.
Learn more about what’s happening to women in Turkey and the awareness campaign here.
4 Tips to Avoid Hijacking a Hashtag
1. Google may be a good place to start but should by no means be your only research method. Because high profile celebrities inadvertently derailed this campaign, impacting the hashtag coverage and search ranking.
2. Check social sites, especially Twitter. Look at the comments on high profile posts to get a sense of the conversations taking place.
3. Tools such as Hashtagify and Twubs are free tools you can use to research hashtags as well as what's trending along with the hashtags.
4. Slang and jargon evolve and some of us miss the memo. I don't want to say I'm old, but actually, yeah, in terms of slang, I am and that's okay. I had to look up "on fleek" years ago to discover it original use of describing perfectly-groomed eyebrows and subsequent evolution to describe flawlessness about many things. I believe this term has piqued and fizzled out, but please refer to Z-Gen to confirm. Check online dictionaries and/or slang dictionaries. And be advised Urban Dictionary *can* be accurate but is often hilariously snarky.