Sandra. People don’t necessarily “own” a hashtag. However, hashtags are created by an individual, group or company to create a campaign. This way people can quickly share and find Tweets on that topic. It is Twitter etiquette (and expectations) to follow the hashtag properly. Anyone can easily figure out what a hashtag is trending about. In this case, it was obviously trending about women who had (or still are) in abusive relationships. DiGiorno only had to take a couple of minutes to look at the Tweets to figure this out. But someone jumped the gun. So as women were looking for support and educating others about why people may stay in abusive relationships, they were met with this disconnected and offensive tweet. DiGiorno is doing the right thin by apologizing.

Of course they’re a large corporation with plenty of resources and I assume those that take care of their social media would have the knowledge to find this out beforehand, or even already know some of it.

Even if I saw many people using it for that, I didn’t know that one particular subject/theme/issue ‘owned’ an entire hashtag. Is that true? Does one particular subject/theme/socialissue/etc in essence ‘own’ a hashtag?

If that’s the case and their social media people knew that then they should apologize, if that’s not the case, then I’m glad they still apologized but they shouldn’t be made out to be any kind of bad guy for using something that is fair use. Please explain, or tell me a good place to find an explanation. Please don’t tell me to google it. I have and that doesn’t really help.

BTW I do like and agree with explaining to one’s child the consequences of their actions and not just making them say “I’m sorry.”