Twitter’s hashtags turn 10 today

Mostly everything you have on social media these days is more or less always accompanied by a #hashtag. It is difficult to envision content on social media without that.

Yesterday, Twitter celebrates 10 years of one of its most popular and controversial and consistent features by using #Hashtag10.

In a basic way, Twitter’s hashtag is a shorthand manner of bringing together a conversation on anything from an event, like #Eclipse2017, to a topic like online hate.

Hashtags themselves have ranged from silly to serious. Cute moments like #batkidcaptured the country's attention when a cancer-stricken boy got his "Make-A-Wish"granted to play a superhero across San Francisco.

Meanwhile, there's been the campaign to draw attention to nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian children with #BringBackOurGirls, police misconduct with #BlackLivesMatter and, in the past couple of weeks, #ThisIsNotUS in response to the racially charged violent protestsin Charlottesville, Virginia.