My heart sank when I saw #KillAllMuslims was trending yesterday. But then I saw how it was being used. Nearly all the tweets were condemning the hashtag with tweets like this:

I'm so sad to see this… #KillAllMuslims

— Abdul Raheem Rudolph (@rudol9h) January 7, 2015

And this:

The #KillAllMuslims hashtag seems to consist solely of tweets objecting to the #KillAllMuslims hashtag.

— Susan (@marthasydenham) January 7, 2015

Twitter needs to create metahashtags.

They would work something like this: Put a hashtag in front of a hashtag creating a metahashtag like ##KillAllMuslims. The extra hashtag would mean that this is a hashtag about a hashtag.

Metahashtags should be counted separately from hashtags in which case in the current situation it might be apparent that what is trending is conversation about the hashtag; not the hashtag itself.

If anyone at Twitter sees this, why not toss the idea around. The need seems to be real and the coding couldn’t be that difficult — at least in the eyes of someone who writes no code 😉