'Feminists Are Ugly' Hashtag Resurfaces on Twitter: Users Respond To Trending Subject

Oops. On Sunday, the hashtag #feministsareugly began trending on social media site Twitter, and thousands of feminists replied with selfies demonstrating the opposite. The resurgence of the trend ended up being a mistake on Twitter’s part, after the site pulled a headline from an article written last summer.

In August, two feminists started the #feministsareugly trend on the microblogging site, with feminist Twitter user Lily Bolourian tweeting a selfie alongside the hashtag. Bolourian began a movement that resulted in thousands of female users tweeting photos of themselves, challenging the stereotype.

Earlier this month, Twitter released a new homepage that pulled headlines, hashtags and images from the site’s users to demonstrate its usefulness as a fast-paced news service. However, the new interface made a number of mistakes, pulling a headline from a news site from more than eight months ago -- “Ugly Feminists Freak Out Over #FeministsAreUgly Hashtag.”

Twitter’s response? The social media site removed the tag from its trending lists, and now the subject doesn’t appear as a trending topic worldwide or within the U.S. Users can still search for tweets related to the hashtag via the search feature.

That didn’t stop some of Twitter’s estimated 288 million monthly active users from speaking out against the hashtag. View some of their responses below: