#AskChevron is trending on Twitter, but if you think it was part of a Chevron promotional campaign related to the company’s annual shareholders meeting today in Midland, Texas — think again.
The hashtag, promoted and parked atop Twitter’s worldwide trend widget for most of the day, wasn’t a Chevron creation. It was created by an environmental group Toxic Effect, protesting Chevron’s oil production in Amazon rainforests in Ecuador and the damage it has allegedly caused over the years.
The group has been sharing tweets like this:
#TRIVIA Chevron is guilty of… #AskChevron pic.twitter.com/Htosq3qDvp — ToxicEffect (@thetoxiceffect) May 27, 2014
Not surprisingly, the hashtag has been embraced by Twitter’s resident environmentalists, some of whom apparently believe that Chevron is doing the asking. It might strike some as a similar situation to J.P. Morgan’s #AskJPM P.R. disaster of last November. But that was a highjacked hashtag for a Twitter Q&A; this one is a freelance invention.
And a very effective one. By this late this afternoon, the hashtag had been tweeted more than 5,600 times, according to Topsy.
Chevron’s Twitter account has not engaged, sticking to updates from the shareholders meeting, a tour of its facility in Midland and other tweets:
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