Demystifying hashtag hijacking in the public opinion game: attention, narratives, and social bots

Summary

This paper reframes hashtag hijacking — the appropriation or redirection of a trending hashtag by actors with competing agendas — as a deliberate strategy within online public opinion contests rather than as incidental drift or noise. Drawing on platform politics, computational propaganda, and the sociology of attention, the authors argue that hijacking outcomes are shaped by the interplay of three forces: attention capture, narrative substitution, and automated amplification via social bots. The contribution is an integrative analytic lens that treats these factors as jointly constitutive of contested hashtag discourse.

Key Contributions

• Positions hashtag hijacking as a strategic move in public opinion games, not a peripheral phenomenon.
• Offers an integrated framework combining attention dynamics, narrative framing, and bot activity.
• Extends the literature on social bots by specifying their role in shifting hashtag-level discursive trajectories.

Methods

Conceptual and empirical analysis of hashtag hijacking episodes, situated within debates on platform-mediated political communication. The available abstract does not specify the dataset, platform scope, or computational techniques used to detect bots or measure narrative shifts.

Findings

• Successful hijacking depends on simultaneously capturing attention and substituting an alternative narrative frame.
• Social bots are implicated as non-trivial amplifiers that can redirect the trajectory of hashtag conversations.
• Attention, narrative, and automation operate as coupled mechanisms rather than independent factors.

Connections

This work intersects with broader research on coordinated amplification and bot-driven influence on social platforms, particularly studies that examine how automated accounts shape hashtag-level discourse such as Minici2024-tf and Luceri2025-tr. Its emphasis on narrative substitution within contested hashtags resonates with analyses of strategic framing in coordinated campaigns like Kuznetsova2025-nu and Kansaon2025-id, while the attention-capture angle complements platform-politics framings found in Graham2025-gp.