Why Moderation Matters: How #Agile2013’s hashtag was hijacked

Large social media display boards have become a mainstay at conferences in the past few years and for good reason. They are great for highlighting tweets and photos from conference attendees and promoting social content around shared discussions.

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But without careful moderation, they are ripe for abuse.

Such was the case at the Agile2013 Conference in Nashville Tennessee this past August. The conference organizers had 5 large screens that showed tweets with #Agile2013.

A conference attendee posted to the infamous 4chan /b/ board asking fellow readers to cure his boredom by hijacking the twitter boards and tweeting ridiculous/offensive/pornographic tweets and photos using the #Agile2013 hashtag. The twitter boards were immediately filled with extremely inappropriate content for the entire conference to see.

While most of it was clearly spam, there were some tweets that could have been mistaken as truthful tweets and could have easily caused panic and endangered everyone.

At this point, the damage was done. Conference attendees gave up on the hashtag, conference sponsors were not pleased, and the great discussion that was going on beforehand died off. One conference attendee described the hashtag hijacking as ‘virtual graffiti’ and pleaded Twitter to get involved to no avail.

All of this turmoil and embarrassment could easily have been avoided with a proper moderation system in place. Profanity and keyword filtering are also must-haves when considering which social media display platform to use. While moderation can be time-consuming and require more manpower for conference organizers, it is absolutely critical  to take the necessary steps to avoid these kind of embarrassing situations.

To learn about Postano’s robust content and moderation platform, request a demo.