@chrismessina I hadn't thought about it until seeing this, but I'm sympathetic to the argument. Hashtags are a hack to work around computers' inability to understand language. Slogans have existed before Twitter- it's just that computers can't parse natural language slogans. In an ideal world, implementation completely aside, you would expect to simply write about the words "Arab Spring" and for the system to recognize that as a slogan and to group posts about it together.