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Hilarious #cybercrimensw tweets from a hashtag campaign gone wrong

20 October 2015

This must have seemed like a good idea at the time:

The idea of a hashtag campaign is to drum up social support where anyone can chime in with their 2 cents worth and all going according to plan, you get all this nice warm and fuzzy community engagement. Problem is though that hashtag campaigns have a long and sordid history of going off the rails, particularly when the organisation running them doesn’t always have the best standing in the online community. (We’re right at the start of mandatory metadata retention laws here in Australia so the law and “cyber” isn’t sitting real well with everyone right now.)

The other thing about #cybercrimensw is “cyber”. For those of you a little less tuned in to all things online security, “the c word” tends to get abused with reckless abandon. Oh sure there’s cyber-criminals and bullying and fairly reasonable uses of the term, but then somehow we started seeing cyber-bombs and cyber-army and other frankly ridiculous interpretations of the term (Gizmodo did a good writeup on Why You Sound Dumb When You Use The Word 'Cyber' last year). What was wrong with computer-[thing] or online-[thing]?! Apparently it just didn’t have the same news headline ring to it and now here we are.

Anyway, the responses to our first state’s police campaign were frequently hilarious as a result of them possibly not being quite tuned in enough to the nature of hashtag campaigns and the cyber word. Eventually they had to abandon the exercise due to the flood of hashtag spam which is a shame because what they’re doing is in essence a good thing, they just needed a bit more input on how to cyber-engage with the community :)

Here are some of the standouts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, create courses for Pluralsight and am a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals

Troy Hunt

Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, run "Have I Been Pwned" and am a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals

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