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Misleading hashtags: First Great Western or Flat Girl Wins?

Train commuters in search of travel news regularly look for #fgw on Twitter, but some are learning more about flat-chested women than the 18.05 to Frome

Commuter rage is never pretty. A few months back, I saw someone lose it with a First Great Western official at Newbury station. Lots of gesticulations, frustration the about lack of information, a good deal of shouting. Our train from Paddington was late and a connecting service hadn^t been held. Same old story. But I^ve noticed that such outbreaks of public anger are becoming increasingly rare and I now know why: misleading hashtags on Twitter.

The other day, as my evening train home sat outside Reading station for a couple of days, waiting for a platform to be built, I turned to the social networking site in the vain hope of finding out how long we would be delayed. First Great Western has a twitter account, but if you really want to establish what^s happening, search for #fgw. At least, that^s what I^d been told.

Hashtags are a good way of connecting with small communities, allowing mutually relevant tweets (or Facebook postings) to be found easily (they are useless at big events, where millions of people are tweeting the same hashtag). The plan was to connect with other people stranded on my train and have a good moan about the lack of public announcements, the ongoing construction work at Reading station and generally how rubbish the service was. We would all feel better for it, and no one would be embarrassing themselves by taking it out on hapless railway employees.

But First Great Western isn^t the only one using #fgw. Oh no. After an innocent search for the hashtag, I found myself reading with increasingly wide eyes the tweets of @flatgrlwins, who likes to add #fgw ^ short for ^flat girl wins^ - to her dispatches.

@flatgrlwins clearly believes that she has been put on this earth to celebrate the beauty of flat-chested women everywhere and their myriad achievements. She does this eloquently, defiantly, often explicitly (be warned: some of her tweets and retweets are obscene) and never without humour:

This must be very frustrating for those trying to keep abreast of train running.