I haven’t been active on Twitter lately for self-preservation. Even when I open the app, I skim through the feed with a brisk stroke of my thumb. But a recent top trending hashtag on Twitter hit too close to home and I felt compelled to dig further.
A tweet from Dhanya Rajendran, Journalist and Editor-In-Chief of The News Minute, intrigued me. She mentioned a distasteful trending hashtag and called out Twitter India on allowing such malicious content to trend on their platform.
This prompted me to go and check what this was all about. I discovered that the top trending hashtag was one which called a top Tamil actor ‘the son of a prostitute.’ And I was absolutely clueless about where this came from. Baffled and befuddled, I tried to trace the origin of this hashtag only to discover that this was a result of “fan wars.” Fans of the Tamil film actor Vijay put every ounce of effort to spotlight this trend as a means to seek ‘revenge’ on the other team of fans.