A quick note on the hashtag disruption around the Dominic Cummings affair.

I've never seen it executed as thoroughly. Cummimgs, Cunmings, Cummnings, every variation you could think of.

Given that many Twitter users don't know about this kind of thing, here's a tiny explainer

If there's one group of people who are guaranteed to be on Twitter, it's journalists. That's half the reason why trends matter. Because journalists see trends, know there is interest in a story and also find information on the story by diving into the trending hashtag

The fact that Dominic Cummings has been trending for several days is therefore a problem to his people (strong Conservative supporters, those who will benefit from the slash & burn aspects of Brexit etc...

...the shady types like that Lynton Crosby-linked Mainstream Network thing that was one of many 'dark' (as in secretly funded and organised) assets introduced to support Boris Johnson's election as leader of the Conservative Party).

They want the news cycle to move on and part of that means stopping the Dominic Cummings affair from being front of mind for Twitter users & especially journalists. They want it to stop trending.

So they dilute the trend by fragmenting it.

Fragment the trending topic into many hashtags by using incorrecty spelled variations of it. Remember when #DominicCummings was ranking as top trend, because we were all using his name? We aren't naming him as much now, so we rely on Twitter autofilling a hashtag for us

So if trending topics rely on the heft of volume and, say, it takes 10,000 tweets to achieve heavy trending, all you have to do is get everyone using different hashtags.

You then have 10,000 tweets that are apparently no longer linked. So the Twitter machine notices less.

The anger about Dominic Cummings hasn't subsided and the Twitter traffic about him is undiminished, but a glance at trends doesn't suggest this. It suggests that the news cycle is grinding on past the Dominic Cummings affair. That's what you're meant to think.

That's all it is. I've seen users asking why the misspelled hashtags and that's it.

It's a kind of news management tool. It's not the first time we've seen it.

Anyway, keep talking about Dominic Cummings so that the issue remains hot.