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113-498: A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash symbol , # . On social media , hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as X (former name as Twitter) or Tumblr as a form of user-generated tagging that enables cross-referencing of content by topic or theme. For example, a search within Instagram for the hashtag #bluesky returns all posts that have been tagged with that term. After

226-406: A YouTube video) in order to attract viewers. This abuse can be mitigated using human or statistical identification of spam items. The number of tags allowed may also be limited to reduce spam. Some tagging systems provide a single text box to enter tags, so to be able to tokenize the string, a separator must be used. Two popular separators are the space character and the comma . To enable

339-686: A backchannel of discussion via social media prior to, during, or after the program. Television commercials have sometimes contained hashtags for similar purposes. The increased usage of hashtags as brand promotion devices has been compared to the promotion of branded " keywords " by AOL in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as such keywords were also promoted at the end of television commercials and series episodes. Organized real-world events have used hashtags and ad hoc lists for discussion and promotion among participants. Hashtags are used as beacons by event participants to find each other, both on Twitter and, in many cases, during actual physical events. Since

452-474: A document , digital image , database table , or web page ). Knowledge tags are more than traditional non-hierarchical keywords or terms ; they are a type of metadata that captures knowledge in the form of descriptions, categorizations, classifications, semantics , comments, notes, annotations, hyperdata , hyperlinks , or references that are collected in tag profiles (a kind of ontology ). These tag profiles reference an information resource that resides in

565-508: A hand gesture , sometimes called the "finger hashtag", in which the index and middle finger both hands are extended and arranged perpendicularly to form the hash, was documented. Companies, businesses, and advocacy organizations have taken advantage of hashtag-based discussions for promotion of their products, services or campaigns. In the early 2010s, some television broadcasters began to employ hashtags related to programs in digital on-screen graphics , to encourage viewers to participate in

678-444: A television station or cable network . VoIP spam is VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) spam, usually using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) . This is nearly identical to telemarketing calls over traditional phone lines. When the user chooses to receive the spam call, a pre-recorded spam message or advertisement is usually played back. This is generally easier for the spammer as VoIP services are cheap and easy to anonymize over

791-446: A book, or to sub-themes of the overall subject), then a group of tags for these themes can be attached to each of the items in the larger collection. In this way, freeform classification allows the author to manage what would otherwise be unwieldy amounts of information. A triple tag or machine tag uses a special syntax to define extra semantic information about the tag, making it easier or more meaningful for interpretation by

904-557: A case in a federal court against the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of spamming. U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of about $ 10 million under Oklahoma law. In June 2007, two men were convicted of eight counts stemming from sending millions of e-mail spam messages that included hardcore pornographic images. Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California

1017-427: A cheese product ), but this term did not persist. In the late 19th century, Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864, when some British politicians received an unsolicited telegram advertising a dentist. The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined )

1130-707: A computer program. Triple tags comprise three parts: a namespace , a predicate , and a value. For example, geo:long=50.123456 is a tag for the geographical longitude coordinate whose value is 50.123456. This triple structure is similar to the Resource Description Framework model for information. The triple tag format was first devised for geolicious in November 2004, to map Delicious bookmarks, and gained wider acceptance after its adoption by Mappr and GeoBloggers to map Flickr photos. In January 2007, Aaron Straup Cope at Flickr introduced

1243-660: A distributed, and often heterogeneous, storage repository. Knowledge tags are part of a knowledge management discipline that leverages Enterprise 2.0 methodologies for users to capture insights, expertise, attributes, dependencies, or relationships associated with a data resource. Different kinds of knowledge can be captured in knowledge tags, including factual knowledge (that found in books and data), conceptual knowledge (found in perspectives and concepts), expectational knowledge (needed to make judgments and hypothesis), and methodological knowledge (derived from reasoning and strategies). These forms of knowledge often exist outside

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1356-561: A hash (#) character followed by other characters, and is terminated by a space or the end of the line. Some platforms may require the # to be preceded with a space. Most or all platforms that support hashtags permit the inclusion of letters (without diacritics ), numerals, and underscores. Other characters may be supported on a platform-by-platform basis. Some characters, such as & are generally not supported as they may already serve other search functions. Hashtags are not case sensitive (a search for "#hashtag" will match "#HashTag" as well), but

1469-460: A hash symbol # (as opposed to those local to a server, which uses an ampersand '&'). The use of the pound sign in IRC inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network. He proposed the usage of hashtags on Twitter: How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]? According to Messina, he suggested use of

1582-550: A hashtag, #TwitterIPO, appeared in the headline of a New York Times front-page article regarding Twitter's initial public offering . In 2014 Bird's Eye foods released "Mashtags", a mashed potato product with pieces shaped either like @ or # . In 2019, the British Ornithological Union included a hash character in the design of its new Janet Kear Union Medal, to represent "science communication and social media". Linguists argue that hashtagging

1695-466: A huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen. In early chat-room services like PeopleLink and the early days of Online America (later known as America Online or AOL), they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python sketch. This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It

1808-412: A link to a supposed keygen , trainer, ISO file for a video game , or something similar. The actual content of the video ends up being totally unrelated, a Rickroll , offensive, or simply on-screen text of a link to the site being promoted. In some cases, the link in question may lead to an online survey site, a password-protected archive file with instructions leading to the aforementioned survey (though

1921-436: A lot of harm before finally realizing that the business is not profitable. Some companies and groups "rank" spammers; spammers who make the news are sometimes referred to by these rankings. In all cases listed above, including both commercial and non-commercial, "spam happens" because of a positive cost–benefit analysis result; if the cost to recipients is excluded as an externality the spammer can avoid paying. Cost

2034-417: A post, along with (or instead of) placing the post into a predetermined category. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball and tickets . Each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. To reclassify

2147-703: A post, an author edits its list of tags. All connections between posts are automatically tracked and updated by the blog software; there is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories. Some desktop applications and web applications feature their own tagging systems, such as email tagging in Gmail and Mozilla Thunderbird , bookmark tagging in Firefox , audio tagging in iTunes or Winamp , and photo tagging in various applications. Some of these applications display collections of tags as tag clouds . There are various systems for applying tags to

2260-403: A prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk. The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel , began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the " Green Card spam", after

2373-490: A problem when the Internet was opened for commercial use in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and by 2007 it constituted about 80% to 85% of all e-mail, by a conservative estimate. Pressure to make email spam illegal has resulted in legislation in some jurisdictions, but less so in others. The efforts taken by governing bodies, security systems and email service providers seem to be helping to reduce

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2486-841: A result do not have any specific functionality or a meaningful description; (ii) multiple instances of the same app being published to obtain increased visibility in the app market; and (iii) apps that make excessive use of unrelated keywords to attract users through unintended searches. Bluespam, or the action of sending spam to Bluetooth -enabled devices, is another form of spam that has developed in recent years. E-mail and other forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many early Usenet spams were religious or political. Serdar Argic , for instance, spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelists have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A growing number of criminals are also using spam to perpetrate various sorts of fraud. In 2011

2599-497: A single hashtag can be used for any number of purposes, and that the accepted meaning of a hashtag can change with time. Hashtags intended for discussion of a particular event tend to use an obscure wording to avoid being caught up with generic conversations on similar subjects, such as a cake festival using #cakefestival rather than simply #cake. However, this can also make it difficult for topics to become "trending topics" because people often use different spelling or words to refer to

2712-420: A sufficient conversion rate to keep the spamming alive. Furthermore, even though spam appears not to be economically viable as a way for a reputable company to do business, it suffices for professional spammers to convince a tiny proportion of gullible advertisers that it is viable for those spammers to stay in business. Finally, new spammers go into business every day, and the low costs allow a single spammer to do

2825-486: A user are broadcast to all followers of the user. Spammers, out of malicious intent, post either unwanted (or irrelevant) information or spread misinformation on social media platforms. Spreading beyond the centrally managed social networking platforms, user-generated content increasingly appears on business, government, and nonprofit websites worldwide. Fake accounts and comments planted by computers programmed to issue social spam can infiltrate these websites. Blog spam

2938-516: A waitress reading out a menu where every item but one includes the Spam canned luncheon meat. As the waitress recites the Spam-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drown out all conversations with a song, repeating "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!". In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs , who would repeat "Spam"

3051-536: A web page's source code and were not modifiable by users. In 1997, the collaborative portal "A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands" produced by documenta X, Germany, used the folksonomic term Tag for its co-authors and guest authors on its Upload page. In "The Equator" the term Tag for user-input was described as an abstract literal or keyword to aid the user. However, users defined singular Tags , and did not share Tags at that point. In 2003,

3164-556: Is a common approach in social networking spam such as that generated by the social networking site Quechup . Instant messaging spam makes use of instant messaging systems. Although less prevalent than its e-mail counterpart, according to a report from Ferris Research, 500 million spam IMs were sent in 2003, twice the level of 2002. Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that is,

3277-554: Is a morphological process and that hashtags function as words . The popularity of a hashtag is influenced less by its conciseness and clarity, and more by the presence of preexisting popular hashtags with similar syntactic formats. This suggests that, similar to word formation , users may see the syntax of an existing viral hashtag as a blueprint for creating new ones. For instance, the viral hashtag #JeSuisCharlie gave rise to other popular indicative mood hashtags like #JeVoteMacron and #JeChoisisMarine. Tag (metadata) Tagging

3390-498: Is named after Spam , a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly. Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by

3503-421: Is spamming on weblogs . In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site. Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks , both of which accept user contributions. Another possible form of spam in blogs

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3616-460: Is that search engine indexes are inundated with useless pages, increasing the cost of each processed query". The costs of spam also include the collateral costs of the struggle between spammers and the administrators and users of the media threatened by spamming. Email spam exemplifies a tragedy of the commons : spammers use resources (both physical and human), without bearing the entire cost of those resources. In fact, spammers commonly do not bear

3729-484: Is the combination of: Benefit is the total expected profit from spam, which may include any combination of the commercial and non-commercial reasons listed above. It is normally linear, based on the incremental benefit of reaching each additional spam recipient, combined with the conversion rate . The conversion rate for botnet -generated spam has recently been measured to be around one in 12,000,000 for pharmaceutical spam and one in 200,000 for infection sites as used by

3842-481: Is the first case in which US prosecutors used identity theft laws to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name. In an attempt to assess potential legal and technical strategies for stopping illegal spam, a study cataloged three months of online spam data and researched website naming and hosting infrastructures. The study concluded that: 1) half of all spam programs have their domains and servers distributed over just eight percent or fewer of

3955-475: Is the spamming of a certain tag on websites such as Tumblr. In actual video spam, the uploaded video is given a name and description with a popular figure or event that is likely to draw attention, or within the video a certain image is timed to come up as the video's thumbnail image to mislead the viewer, such as a still image from a feature film, purporting to be a part-by-part piece of a movie being pirated, e.g. Big Buck Bunny Full Movie Online - Part 1/10 HD ,

4068-536: Is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed of their use that draws fire. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some spam as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and conversion , some laws specifically targeting spam have been proposed. In 2004, United States passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 that provided ISPs with tools to combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head who settled

4181-502: The American Civil Liberties Union has to do with so-called "stealth blocking", a term for ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their users' knowledge. These groups' concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce spam-related costs may select tools that (either through error or design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as "spam-friendly". Few object to the existence of these tools; it

4294-615: The American Dialect Society 's New Words Committee. Messina's suggestion to use the hashtag was not immediately adopted by Twitter, but the convention gained popular acceptance when hashtags were used in tweets relating to the 2007 San Diego forest fires in Southern California. The hashtag gained international acceptance during the 2009–2010 Iranian election protests ; Twitter users used both English- and Persian -language hashtags in communications during

4407-533: The Bosnian War . However, as it was a violation of their terms of service, the ISP Panix deleted all of the bulk posts from Usenet, only missing three copies . Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and anti-spam efforts) moved chiefly to email, where it remains today. By 1999, Khan C. Smith, a well known hacker at the time, had begun to commercialize the bulk email industry and rallied thousands into

4520-591: The COVID-19 pandemic , Instagram hashtags were shown in a 2022 article to foster scientific education and promote remote learning. During the April 2011 Canadian party leader debate , Jack Layton , then-leader of the New Democratic Party , referred to Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper 's crime policies as "a [ sic ] hashtag fail" (presumably #fail). In 2010 Kanye West used

4633-480: The Storm botnet . The authors of the study calculating those conversion rates noted, "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted." Spam can be used to spread computer viruses , trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft , or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud ). Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed, while some attempts to take advantage of

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4746-489: The University of California, Berkeley and OvGU demonstrated that most (web-based) academic search engines, especially Google Scholar are not capable of identifying spam attacks. The researchers manipulated the citation counts of articles, and managed to make Google Scholar index complete fake articles, some containing advertising. Spamming in mobile app stores include (i) apps that were automatically generated and as

4859-482: The assembly language of the PDP-11 when placed next to a symbol or a number, and around 1973, '#' was introduced in the C programming language to indicate special keywords that the C preprocessor had to process first. The pound sign was adopted for use within IRC ( Internet Relay Chat ) networks around 1988 to label groups and topics. Channels or topics that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with

4972-430: The correlations that form between different tags. In addition, research has suggested that it is easier for machine learning algorithms to learn tag semantics when users tag "verbosely"—when they annotate resources with a wealth of freely associated, descriptive keywords. Tagging systems open to the public are also open to tag spam, in which people apply an excessive number of tags or unrelated tags to an item (such as

5085-525: The dollar sign (e.g., $ XRX ). In July 2012, Twitter began supporting the tag convention and dubbed it the "cashtag". The convention has extended to national currencies, and Cash App has implemented the cashtag to mark usernames. Hashtags are particularly useful in unmoderated forums that lack a formal ontological organization. Hashtags help users find content similar interest. Hashtags are neither registered nor controlled by any one user or group of users. They do not contain any set definitions, meaning that

5198-685: The open-source OpenMeta standard provided similar tagging functionality for Mac OS X . Several semantic file systems that implement tags are available for the Linux kernel , including Tagsistant . Microsoft Windows allows users to set tags only on Microsoft Office documents and some kinds of picture files. Cross-platform file tagging standards include Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), an ISO standard for embedding metadata into popular image, video and document file formats, such as JPEG and PDF , without breaking their readability by applications that do not support XMP. XMP largely supersedes

5311-440: The social bookmarking website Delicious provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks (as a way to help find them later); Delicious also provided browseable aggregated views of the bookmarks of all users featuring a particular tag. Within a couple of years, the photo sharing website Flickr allowed its users to add their own text tags to each of their pictures, constructing flexible and easy metadata that made

5424-407: The "#HELSINKI2018 Meeting". Hashtags have been used to gather customer criticism of large companies. In January 2012, McDonald's created the #McDStories hashtag so that customers could share positive experiences about the restaurant chain, but the marketing effort was cancelled after two hours when critical tweets outnumbered praising ones. In 2017, the #MeToo hashtag became viral in response to

5537-503: The #MFLtwitterati hashtag demonstrates the uses of hashtags for creating community and sharing teaching resources. The majority of participants reported positive impact on their teaching strategies as inspired by many ideas shared by different individuals in the Hashtag. Emerging research in communication and learning demonstrates how hashtag practices influence the teaching and development of students. An analysis of eight studies examined

5650-519: The 2012–13 season, the NBA has allowed fans to vote players in as All-Star Game starters on Twitter and Facebook using #NBAVOTE. Hashtag-centered biomedical Twitter campaigns have shown to increase the reach, promotion, and visibility of healthcare-related open innovation platforms. Political protests and campaigns in the early 2010s, such as #OccupyWallStreet and #LibyaFeb17 , have been organized around hashtags or have made extensive usage of hashtags for

5763-424: The Internet, and there are many options for sending mass number of calls from a single location. Accounts or IP addresses being used for VoIP spam can usually be identified by a large number of outgoing calls, low call completion and short call length. Academic search engines enable researchers to find academic literature and are used to obtain citation data for calculating author-level metrics . Researchers from

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5876-437: The additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem. Spam's direct effects include the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted messages. Large companies who are frequent spam targets utilize numerous techniques to detect and prevent spam. The cost to providers of search engines is significant: "The secondary consequence of spamming

5989-504: The apparent lack of control, research has shown that a simple form of shared vocabulary emerges in social bookmarking systems. Collaborative tagging exhibits a form of complex systems dynamics (or self-organizing dynamics). Thus, even if no central controlled vocabulary constrains the actions of individual users, the distribution of tags converges over time to stable power law distributions. Once such stable distributions form, simple folksonomic vocabularies can be extracted by examining

6102-643: The business by building more friendly bulk email software and providing internet access illegally hacked from major ISPs such as Earthlink and Botnets. By 2009 the majority of spam sent around the World was in the English language ; spammers began using automatic translation services to send spam in other languages. Email spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email (UBE), or junk mail, is the practice of sending unwanted email messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities. Spam in email started to become

6215-402: The cost at all. This raises the costs for everyone. In some ways spam is even a potential threat to the entire email system, as operated in the past. Since email is so cheap to send, a tiny number of spammers can saturate the Internet with junk mail. Although only a tiny percentage of their targets are motivated to purchase their products (or fall victim to their scams), the low cost may provide

6328-430: The data itself and are derived from personal experience, insight, or expertise. Knowledge tags are considered an expansion of the information itself that adds additional value, context, and meaning to the information. Knowledge tags are valuable for preserving organizational intelligence that is often lost due to turnover , for sharing knowledge stored in the minds of individuals that is typically isolated and unharnessed by

6441-846: The distinction between a single hierarchical tree structure (in which there is one correct way to classify each item) versus multiple non-hierarchical sets (in which there are multiple ways to classify an item); the structure of both top-down and bottom-up taxonomies may be either hierarchical, non-hierarchical, or a combination of both. Some researchers and applications have experimented with combining hierarchical and non-hierarchical tagging to aid in information retrieval. Others are combining top-down and bottom-up tagging, including in some large library catalogs ( OPACs ) such as WorldCat . When tags or other taxonomies have further properties (or semantics ) such as relationships and attributes , they constitute an ontology . Metadata tags as described in this article should not be confused with

6554-442: The earlier IPTC Information Interchange Model . Exif is a standard that specifies the image and audio file formats used by digital cameras , including some metadata tags. TagSpaces is an open-source cross-platform application for tagging files; it inserts tags into the filename . An official tag is a keyword adopted by events and conferences for participants to use in their web publications, such as blog entries, photos of

6667-412: The event, and presentation slides. Search engines can then index them to make relevant materials related to the event searchable in a uniform way. In this case, the tag is part of a controlled vocabulary . A researcher may work with a large collection of items (e.g. press quotes, a bibliography, images) in digital form. If he/she wishes to associate each with a small number of themes (e.g. to chapters of

6780-509: The events. Hashtags have since played critical roles in recent social movements such as #jesuischarlie , #BLM , and #MeToo . Beginning July 2, 2009, Twitter began to hyperlink all hashtags in tweets to Twitter search results for the hashtagged word (and for the standard spelling of commonly misspelled words). In 2010, Twitter introduced " Trending Topics " on the Twitter front page, displaying hashtags that are rapidly becoming popular, and

6893-503: The files in a computer's file system . In Apple 's Mac System 7 , released in 1991, users could assign one of seven editable colored labels (with editable names such as "Essential", "Hot", and "In Progress") to each file and folder. In later iterations of the Mac operating system ever since OS X 10.9 was released in 2013, users could assign multiple arbitrary tags as extended file attributes to any file or folder, and before that time

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7006-453: The flexibility of tagging allows users to classify their collections of items in the ways that they find useful, but the personalized variety of terms can present challenges when searching and browsing. When users can freely choose tags (creating a folksonomy , as opposed to selecting terms from a controlled vocabulary ), the resulting metadata can include homonyms (the same tags used with different meanings) and synonyms (multiple tags for

7119-424: The guise of a user's trusted contacts such as friends and family. As for Twitter, spammers gain credibility by following verified accounts such as that of Lady Gaga; when that account owner follows the spammer back, it legitimizes the spammer. Twitter has studied what interest structures allow their users to receive interesting tweets and avoid spam, despite the site using the broadcast model, in which all tweets from

7232-406: The hashtag contains unspaced characters, separated from preceding and following text by spaces (e.g., '我 #爱 你' instead of '我#爱你') or by zero-width non-joiner characters before and after the hashtagged element, to retain a linguistically natural appearance (displaying as unspaced '我‌#爱‌你', but with invisible non-joiners delimiting the hashtag). Some communities may limit, officially or unofficially,

7345-412: The hashtag to make it easy for lay users without specialized knowledge of search protocols to find specific relevant content. Therefore, the hashtag "was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages". The first published use of the term "hash tag" was in a blog post "Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings" by Stowe Boyd, on August 26, 2007, according to lexicographer Ben Zimmer , chair of

7458-490: The information or message that appears with the hashtag. "My arms are getting darker by the minute. #toomuchfaketan". Another function of the hashtag can be used to express personal feelings and emotions. For example, with "It's Monday!! #excited #sarcasm" in which the adjectives are directly indicating the emotions of the speaker. Verbal use of the word hashtag is sometimes used in informal conversations. Use may be humorous, such as "I'm hashtag confused!" By August 2012, use of

7571-457: The initial hash symbol, a hashtag may include letters, numerals or other punctuation. The use of hashtags was first proposed by American blogger and product consultant Chris Messina in a 2007 tweet. Messina made no attempt to patent the use because he felt that "they were born of the internet, and owned by no one". Hashtags became entrenched in the culture of Twitter and soon emerged across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. In June 2014, hashtag

7684-546: The latter to end communication with the advertiser via SMS altogether. Despite the high number of phone users, there has not been so much phone spam, because there is a charge for sending SMS. Recently, there are also observations of mobile phone spam delivered via browser push notifications. These can be a result of allowing websites which are malicious or delivering malicious ads to send a user notifications. Facebook and Twitter are not immune to messages containing spam links. Spammers hack into accounts and send false links under

7797-455: The lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004. But the law is criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the law was supported by some spammers and organizations that support spamming, and opposed by many in the anti-spam community. Earthlink won a $ 25 million judgment against one of the most notorious and active "spammers" Khan C. Smith in 2001 for his role in founding

7910-400: The linked-to page acts as a tag for the current context. Spamming Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages ( spam ) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising , non-commercial proselytizing , or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing ), or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While

8023-513: The menu items in the Monty Python sketch. One of the earliest people to use "spam" in this sense was Joel Furr . This use had also become established—to "spam" Usenet was to flood newsgroups with junk messages. The word was also attributed to the flood of " Make Money Fast " messages that clogged many newsgroups during the 1990s. In 1998, the New Oxford Dictionary of English , which had previously only defined "spam" in relation to

8136-466: The modern spam industry which dealt billions in economic damage and established thousands of spammers into the industry. His email efforts were said to make up more than a third of all Internet email being sent from 1999 until 2002. Sanford Wallace and Cyber Promotions were the target of a string of lawsuits, many of which were settled out of court, up through a 1998 Earthlink settlement that put Cyber Promotions out of business. Attorney Laurence Canter

8249-413: The most widely recognized form of spam is email spam , the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam , Usenet newsgroup spam , Web search engine spam , spam in blogs , wiki spam , online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam , Internet forum spam , junk fax transmissions , social spam , spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It

8362-548: The number of hashtags permitted on a single post. Misuse of hashtags can lead to account suspensions. Twitter warns that adding hashtags to unrelated tweets, or repeated use of the same hashtag without adding to a conversation can filter an account from search results, or suspend the account. Individual platforms may deactivate certain hashtags either for being too generic to be useful, such as #photography on Instagram, or due to their use to facilitate illegal activities. In 2009, StockTwits began using ticker symbols preceded by

8475-427: The organization, and for connecting knowledge that is often lost or disconnected from an information resource. In a typical tagging system, there is no explicit information about the meaning or semantics of each tag, and a user can apply new tags to an item as easily as applying older tags. Hierarchical classification systems can be slow to change, and are rooted in the culture and era that created them; in contrast,

8588-658: The origins of spam were analyzed by Cisco Systems . They provided a report that shows spam volume originating from countries worldwide. Hormel Foods Corporation , the maker of SPAM luncheon meat, does not object to the Internet use of the term "spamming". However, they did ask that the capitalized word "Spam" be reserved to refer to their product and trademark. The European Union 's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk email" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide. The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $ 13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and

8701-420: The phenomenon of hashtag activism. The use of hashtags, especially, in this case, allowed for better and easier access to search for content related to this social media movement. The use of hashtags also reveals what feelings or sentiment an author attaches to a statement. This can range from the obvious, where a hashtag directly describes the state of mind, to the less obvious. For example, words in hashtags are

8814-617: The physical world is museum object tagging. People were using textual keywords to classify information and objects long before computers. Computer based search algorithms made the use of such keywords a rapid way of exploring records. Tagging gained popularity due to the growth of social bookmarking , image sharing , and social networking websites. These sites allow users to create and manage labels (or "tags") that categorize content using simple keywords. Websites that include tags often display collections of tags as tag clouds , as do some desktop applications. On websites that aggregate

8927-545: The pictures highly searchable. The success of Flickr and the influence of Delicious popularized the concept, and other social software websites—such as YouTube , Technorati , and Last.fm —also implemented tagging. In 2005, the Atom web syndication standard provided a "category" element for inserting subject categories into web feeds , and in 2007 Tim Bray proposed a "tag" URN . Many systems (and other web content management systems ) allow authors to add free-form tags to

9040-407: The prefix # , sometimes known as a "hash" symbol. This form of tagging is used on microblogging and social networking services such as Twitter , Facebook , Google+ , VK and Instagram . The hash is used to distinguish tag text, as distinct, from other text in the post. A knowledge tag is a type of meta-information that describes or defines some aspect of a piece of information (such as

9153-488: The promotion of discussion. Hashtags are frequently employed to either show support or opposition towards political figures. For example, the hashtag #MakeAmericaGreatAgain signifies support for Trump, whereas #DisinfectantDonnie expresses ridicule of Trump. Hashtags have also been used to promote official events; the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially titled the 2018 Russia–United States summit as

9266-448: The public and by Internet service providers , which have added extra capacity to cope with the volume. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions. A person who creates spam is called a spammer . The term spam is derived from the 1970 "Spam" sketch of the BBC sketch comedy television series Monty Python's Flying Circus . The sketch, set in a cafe , has

9379-706: The repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess". Forum spam is the creation of advertising messages on Internet forums. It is generally done by automated spambots. Most forum spam consists of links to external sites, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track

9492-496: The same concept), which may lead to inappropriate connections between items and inefficient searches for information about a subject. For example, the tag "orange" may refer to the fruit or the color , and items related to a version of the Linux kernel may be tagged "Linux", "kernel", "Penguin", "software", or a variety of other terms. Users can also choose tags that are different inflections of words (such as singular and plural), which can contribute to navigation difficulties if

9605-422: The same topic. For topics to trend, there must be a consensus, whether silent or stated, that the hashtag refers to that specific topic. Hashtags may be used informally to express context around a given message, with no intent to categorize the message for later searching, sharing, or other reasons. Hashtags may thus serve as a reflexive meta-commentary. This can help express contextual cues or offer more depth to

9718-584: The sexual harassment accusations against Harvey Weinstein . The use of this hashtag can be considered part of hashtag activism , spreading awareness across eighty-five different countries with more than seventeen million Tweets using the hashtag #MeToo. This hashtag was not only used to spread awareness of accusations regarding Harvey Weinstein but allowed different women to share their experiences of sexual violence . Using this hashtag birthed multiple different hashtags in connection to #MeToo to encourage more women to share their stories, resulting in further spread of

9831-584: The significance of trending hashtags has become so great that the company makes significant efforts to foil attempts to spam the trending list. During the 2010 World Cup, Twitter explicitly encouraged the use of hashtags with the temporary deployment of "hashflags", which replaced hashtags of three-letter country codes with their respective national flags. Other platforms such as YouTube and Gawker Media followed in officially supporting hashtags, and real-time search aggregators such as Google Real-Time Search began supporting hashtags. A hashtag must begin with

9944-509: The spam-advertised goods in the study; and, 3) a "financial blacklist" of banking entities that do business with spammers would dramatically reduce monetization of unwanted e-mails. Moreover, this blacklist could be updated far more rapidly than spammers could acquire new banking resources, an asymmetry favoring anti-spam efforts. An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and

10057-504: The spambot's identity; if a sale goes through, the spammer behind the spambot earns a commission. Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone . This can be especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience, but also because of the fee they may be charged per text message received in some markets. To comply with CAN-SPAM regulations in the US, SMS messages now must provide options of HELP and STOP,

10170-406: The strongest predictor of whether or not a statement is sarcastic —a difficult AI problem. Hashtags play an important role for employees and students in professional fields and education. In industry, individuals' engagement with a hashtags can provide opportunities for them develop and gain some professional knowledge in their fields. In education, research on language teachers who engaged in

10283-651: The subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or "zealots", claimed they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, and labeled their opponents "anti-commerce radicals". The couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway . An early example of nonprofit fundraising bulk posting via Usenet also occurred in 1994 on behalf of CitiHope, an NGO attempting to raise funds to rescue children at risk during

10396-417: The survey, and the archive file itself, is worthless and does not contain the file in question at all), or in extreme cases, malware . Others may upload videos presented in an infomercial -like format selling their product which feature actors and paid testimonials , though the promoted product or service is of dubious quality and would likely not pass the scrutiny of a standards and practices department at

10509-422: The system does not include stemming of tags when searching or browsing. Larger-scale folksonomies address some of the problems of tagging, in that users of tagging systems tend to notice the current use of "tag terms" within these systems, and thus use existing tags in order to easily form connections to related items. In this way, folksonomies may collectively develop a partial set of tagging conventions. Despite

10622-503: The tags of all users, an individual user's tags can be useful both to them and to the larger community of the website's users. Tagging systems have sometimes been classified into two kinds: top-down and bottom-up . Top-down taxonomies are created by an authorized group of designers (sometimes in the form of a controlled vocabulary ), whereas bottom-up taxonomies (called folksonomies ) are created by all users. This definition of "top down" and "bottom up" should not be confused with

10735-410: The term machine tag as an alternative name for the triple tag, adding some questions and answers on purpose, syntax, and use. Specialized metadata for geographical identification is known as geotagging ; machine tags are also used for other purposes, such as identifying photos taken at a specific event or naming species using binomial nomenclature . A hashtag is a kind of metadata tag marked by

10848-497: The term "hashtag rap " to describe a style of rapping that, according to Rizoh of the Houston Press , uses "a metaphor, a pause, and a one-word punch line , often placed at the end of a rhyme". Rappers Nicki Minaj , Big Sean , Drake , and Lil Wayne are credited with the popularization of hashtag rap, while the style has been criticized by Ludacris , The Lonely Island , and various music writers. On September 13, 2013,

10961-403: The total available hosting registrars and autonomous systems, with 80 percent of spam programs overall being distributed over just 20 percent of all registrars and autonomous systems; 2) of the 76 purchases for which the researchers received transaction information, there were only 13 distinct banks acting as credit card acquirers and only three banks provided the payment servicing for 95 percent of

11074-407: The trademarked food product, added a second definition to its entry for "spam": "Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users." There was also an effort to differentiate between types of newsgroup spam. Messages that were crossposted to too many newsgroups at once, as opposed to those that were posted too frequently, were called "velveeta" (after

11187-409: The twentieth century, and faceted classification has been used by libraries since the 1930s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Emacs , the text editor for Unix systems, offered a companion software program called Tags that could automatically build a table of cross-references called a tags table that Emacs could use to jump between a function call and that function's definition. This use of

11300-468: The use of embedded capitals (i.e., CamelCase ) increases legibility and improves accessibility. Languages that do not use word dividers handle hashtags differently. In China, microblogs Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo use a double-hashtag-delimited #HashName# format, since the lack of spacing between Chinese characters necessitates a closing tag. Twitter uses a different syntax for Chinese characters and orthographies with similar spacing conventions:

11413-550: The use of hashtags in K–12 classrooms and found significant results. These results indicated that hashtags assisted students in voicing their opinions. In addition, hashtags also helped students understand self-organisation and the concept of space beyond place. Related research demonstrated how high school students engagement with hashtag communication practices allowed them to develop story telling skills and cultural awareness. For young people at risk of poverty and social exclusion during

11526-516: The use of separators in the tags, a system may allow for higher-level separators (such as quotation marks ) or escape characters . Systems can avoid the use of separators by allowing only one tag to be added to each input widget at a time, although this makes adding multiple tags more time-consuming. A syntax for use within HTML is to use the rel-tag microformat which uses the rel attribute with value "tag" (i.e., rel="tag" ) to indicate that

11639-567: The use of the word "tag" in some software to refer to an automatically generated cross-reference ; examples of the latter are tags tables in Emacs and smart tags in Microsoft Office . The use of keywords as part of an identification and classification system long predates computers. Paper data storage devices, notably edge-notched cards , that permitted classification and sorting by multiple criteria were already in use prior to

11752-509: The victims' inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing ). One of the world's most prolific spammers, Robert Alan Soloway , was arrested by US authorities on May 31, 2007. Described as one of the top ten spammers in the world, Soloway was charged with 35 criminal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud , aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. Prosecutors allege that Soloway used millions of "zombie" computers to distribute spam during 2003. This

11865-481: The volume of email spam. According to "2014 Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 19" published by Symantec Corporation , spam volume dropped to 66% of all email traffic. An industry of email address harvesting is dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling compiled databases. Some of these address-harvesting approaches rely on users not reading the fine print of agreements, resulting in their agreeing to send messages indiscriminately to their contacts. This

11978-503: The word "tag" did not refer to metadata tags, but was an early use of the word "tag" in software to refer to a word index . Online databases and early websites deployed keyword tags as a way for publishers to help users find content. In the early days of the World Wide Web , the keywords meta element was used by web designers to tell web search engines what the web page was about, but these keywords were only visible in

12091-457: Was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales. Spamming had been practiced as

12204-483: Was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as "a word or phrase with the symbol # in front of it, used on social media websites and apps so that you can search for all messages with the same subject". The number sign or hash symbol , # , has long been used in information technology to highlight specific pieces of text. In 1970, the number sign was used to denote immediate address mode in

12317-474: Was also used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting—for instance, Star Wars fans often invaded Star Trek chat rooms, filling the space with blocks of text until the Star Trek fans left. It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The unwanted message would appear in many, if not all newsgroups, just as Spam appeared in all

12430-500: Was disbarred by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1997 for sending prodigious amounts of spam advertising his immigration law practice. In 2005, Jason Smathers , a former America Online employee, pleaded guilty to charges of violating the CAN-SPAM Act . In 2003, he sold a list of approximately 93 million AOL subscriber e-mail addresses to Sean Dunaway who sold the list to spammers. In 2007, Robert Soloway lost

12543-421: Was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services. It is now also part of other database systems , desktop applications , and operating systems . People use tags to aid classification , mark ownership, note boundaries , and indicate online identity . Tags may take the form of words, images, or other identifying marks. An analogous example of tags in

12656-464: Was sentenced to six years in prison, and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Arizona , was sentenced to 63 months. In addition, the two were fined $ 100,000, ordered to pay $ 77,500 in restitution to AOL , and ordered to forfeit more than $ 1.1 million, the amount of illegal proceeds from their spamming operation. The charges included conspiracy , fraud , money laundering , and transportation of obscene materials. The trial, which began on June 5,

12769-727: Was the first to include charges under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 , according to a release from the Department of Justice . The specific law that prosecutors used under the CAN-Spam Act was designed to crack down on the transmission of pornography in spam. In 2005, Scott J. Filary and Donald E. Townsend of Tampa, Florida were sued by Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist for violating the Florida Electronic Mail Communications Act. The two spammers were required to pay $ 50,000 USD to cover

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