Hashtags act like memes in the way they “spread indiscriminately, without regard to whether they are useful to us, neutral or positively harmful” (Blackmore) . For example, there may be hashtags ranging from Middle East peace to Kanye for president. Through the invention of hashtags, a new mechanism commonly called "social activism" (Gladwell) has emerged, in which people use the power of social media sites such as Twitter to protest and spread activism from behind a screen. In 2009, social protesters took credit for protests against the communist government of Moldova, calling them the “Twitter revolution” (Gladwell). Mark Pfeifle, former National Security Advisor, went so far as to state, “without Twitter, the Iranian people would not have felt empowered and confident to defend freedom and democracy” (Gladwell). Gladwell strongly disagrees with Mark Pfeifle's reasoning and quotes Evgeny Morozov, a Stanford researcher who points out: "Twitter had little importance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist" (Gladwell). Gladwell believes that social media is incapable of accomplishing acts of revolutionary significance and states: "Social media platforms are built around weak ties" and "weak ties rarely lead to high-risk activism" (Gladwell ). People feel dependent on this new method of social activism to