Last night on Raw, R-Truth showed up on commentary during a Bad News Barrett match and pushed the hashtag #GiveTruthAChance. See, Truth had won a random roll-up victory over Barrett on SmackDown, and he obviously hasn’t been given enough chances in his career, so fans were supposed to rally behind the most stale and least interesting character on the roster. It worked for a few seconds, because Twitter is easy enough to game when you have a popular TV show to promote your hashtags on, but then something much more interesting happened.
Later in the evening, the Bellas beat Paige and Emma in about 10 seconds. This was right on the heels of Nikki Bella and Paige being given a shamefully short amount of time at Fastlane. It was the breaking point for a surprisingly large contingent of WWE fans, who transformed the R-Truth hashtag into #GiveDivasAChance, which they’ve used to call for longer matches and more of a spotlight for WWE’s female performers. The new hashtag fared just a tad better than the R-Truth one. #GiveDivasAChance was a worldwide top trend all night, and it’s still going strong as of this morning.
Tens of thousands of tweets have been marked with #GiveDivasAChance already, many of them highlighting shots of WWE’s women being badasses…
https://twitter.com/Sloomzo/status/570160505853071360
… or examples of women having great matches in WWE-owned rings.
Watching #NXT 15th April 2013 .Emma v Bayley 20 minutes in .#GiveDivasAChance #RAW http://t.co/FJO4cpxIRd
— MARK (@joe90101) February 24, 2015
And of course, good ol’ dependable Mick Foley has thrown his voice behind the movement.
https://twitter.com/realmickfoley/status/570102455079444480
Let’s hope WWE doesn’t suddenly come down with selective hashtag blindness. If R-Truth ends up with an IC title match, the Divas damn well better get 10 minutes on next week’s Raw. The fans have spoken, and on WWE’s beloved Twitter, no less. So, here’s hoping the company actually listens.
