#Politics on Twitter goes beyond the left-right ideology divide

In U.S. politics, the main narrative tends to manifest as left vs right, Democrat vs. Republican, but is this reflected in the social media sphere as well? In new research which maps how hashtags in political tweets were used in the lead up to the 2010 Congressional midterm elections, Leticia Bode, Alex Hanna, JungHwan Yang, and Dhavan V. Shah found that some hashtags occurred in discussion groups that were there ideological opposite. They write that this ‘hashjacking’ was a way in which conservatives were able to enter and disrupt a more liberal community’s online discussion.