Fashtag

They’re unable to resist the bait. Every time.

The fashtag or Bash the Hash was an attempted right-wing troll campaign spawned in May 2019 by 4chan's /pol/ board. The campaign was intended to dupe The Media into believing that the is a fascist, alt-right, or hateful symbol. The campaign produced fake adverts, fake media coverage and was praised by numerous far-right pundits.

It didn't work.

Failure
The "fashtag" was favorably received by neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer, "journalist" Tim Pool, fetid swamp /r/TheDonald, ancap furry Mr. Dapperton, disgraced pundit Milo Yiannopoulos and a few small right-wing YouTubers. More than 200 threads on 4chan attempted to organize the operation. Many of these sources claimed or implied that "The Media" was duped and described the hashtag as a "symbol of hate".

In reality, all mainstream coverage noted that the campaign was a hoax, including The Telegraph,, and even fucking RT. This also includes the article from The Daily Dot, which was claimed as proof that the media took the bait despite being written by an InfoWars writer. Claims to the contrary were mostly themselves fake news, including a fake local TV spot and a fake CNN screenshot of SE Cupp produced below:



The term "fashtag" rose to about 1/10th the search volume of "hashtag" in May 2019.

In short, as usual, this 4chan "hoax" mostly consisted of 4channers hoaxing other 4channers into believing that they were actually having an impact.

Switch Reloaded
In Season 4 Episode 8 of the German comedy series Switch: Reloaded, a sketch parodying The Office with Michael Kessler as Adolf Hitler features a redesigned nazi flag with a hashtag/number sign replacing the swastika. The episode first aired in July 2010, nine years before the hoax emerged.