A Brief History of the Hashtag #

The # symbol, also known as the hashtag, is a well-known feature of social media usage, however, the # has been used in electronic communication since the 1960s, and only relatively recently has it migrated across to new platforms.

The # was first used on tone dial telephones, and by telephones I mean the wired landline telephones that people used to have installed in their homes, before the age of the mobile phone. Originally the telephone used to use 80/80v loop disconnect rotary dialing to route a call through the old electromechanical Strowger telephone exchanges, but in the 1960s AT&T telecoms invented the tone dial telephone. Originally these handsets came with just 10 buttons (from 0-9) replicating the numbers on a rotary dial. The * and # keys that we now associate with mobile telephones came into existence shortly afterward as special or programming keys, which allowed the telephone user to program features on the line, such as ring time, remote answerphone, etc.

The adoption of the hashtag grew in the late 1980s with the implementation of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) an extension to the current technology known as the bulletin board system (BBS) a pre-internet communication system accessed through a dial-up modem. The # ‘symbol was used within IRC as a routing prefix to allow users to identify what chat channel they wished to be connected to. The IRC system ran into decline towards the end of the decade, replaced by early versions of the internet-based social media that we use today.

The Hashtag resurfaced again, in 2007 on the social media application Twitter (now X). San Francisco-based technologist, Chris Messina (aka “Factory Joe”)is said to have introduced the concept of a hashtag code word to signify the name of groups. The hashtag would allow users to follow discussions (a kind of virtual group) referencing the hashtag’s use for Internet Relay Chat. In addition to Messina’s original intent, the hashtag concept was quickly assimilated into corporate marketing. Twitter saw a revenue generation opportunity, selling particular hashtags to corporations with pricing varying according to popularity.

The hashtag was also adopted for protests and activism. The hashtag could be used to pool resources generating global protests such as the #metoo #Blacklivesmatter #wakeup or political movements #maga  

SALAZAR, E., 2017. Hashtags 2.0 - An Annotated History of the Hashtag and a Window to its Future, Icono 14, volumen 15 (2), pp. 16-54.