If you have been around the FAIR community for a while, you’ve probably seen us asking you to join our Facebook Page and Twitter account. Our social networks are a great way for you to stay updated on the latest, most important immigration news and opinion. Becoming a fan of Facebook and following FAIR on Twitter are not the only ways to get involved and stay updated on all-things immigration. Twitter hashtags also provide you with a quick and easy way to stay informed about immigration news online.
Here’s a quick Twitter hashtag primer.
Our Twitter followers have no doubt noticed that almost every tweet from FAIR ends with #afire or #immigration. These are “hashtags”, which basically serve as keywords or search terms for the Twitter community. Hashtags are used for categorizing a discussion or narrowing down a much larger topic. By utilizing the pound (#) sign before a word, your tweet is entered into the global conversation related to that #word. Any word or string of characters can become a hashtag and you don’t need a Twitter account to follow them. Simply go to Twitter.com, enter the hashtag you want to follow into the search bar, and Twitter will send you to a results page with the most current tweets using that hashtag.
Hashtags are often acronyms for topics with greater meaning. In FAIR’s case, #afire stands for Americans for Immigration Reform and Enforcement. In addition to #afire and #immigration, here are 5 more hashtags that you can use to follow both sides of the debate:
1. #cir – Open-borders advocates use #CIR to promote their “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” or pro-amnesty positions. At FAIR, following #CIR helps us make sure we also have the most recent information from all sides of the debate.
2. #NoAmnesty – At FAIR we use this hashtag whenever our tweets are related to efforts by pro-amnesty forces to provide amnesty for illegal aliens.
3. #DREAMact – DREAM Act. This hashtag is used by both true immigration reformers and open borders advocates to discuss the #DREAMAct.
4. #Border – We use #border for any tweets pertaining to border security issues.
5. #SB1070 – SB 1070 is used to refer to Arizona’s immigration enforcement bill. FAIR is a supporter of #SB1070 and we use this hashtag often to show our support for the pro-enforcement community.
3 Comments
Hello- still just getting started with Twitter, but I will definitely be joining in the conversation. Thank you for your post. I have a suggestion for this website. Please change the words “illegal aliens to undocumented immigrants or make note of those words being words of the oppressor. When people are called illegal, it dehumanizes them. When they are called aliens, they are made the other. No one is illegal.
By using this language, we continue to perpetuate the idea that immigrants are less deserving of fair decent treatment and that they are criminals. This language is all over the media and infiltrates even the most well meaning powerful conversations, but it has to change in order to truly fight for immigrants’ rights.
Thanks again. See you on Twitter, Liza Wolff-Francis, @matrifocalpoint
Somehow I missed that this website is a supporter of #SB1070 which has hurt countless families as well as the U.S. economy and is the most racist and xenophobic law against immigrants I have seen in my lifetime, other than Alabama’s. That law promotes racial profiling and is anti-American. This site did give me ideas about hashtags to look for, but the information is from a site that is coming from an uneducated and misguided place and I am sorry to have left a comment at all. -Liza Wolff-Francis
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