African soccer gets inadvertent Twitter bump from Canadian military

The Canadian military has told its various commands and memberson Twitter to stop using the hashtag#CAF at least for the duration of the Rio Olympics.

Senior public affairs officials at National Defence say the social media site has released an emoji specifically for the Games that turns the hashtag into the flag for the war-torn Central African Republicand links to a site for soccer results.

The new coding not only applies to current tweets, but all previous ones as well.

The department's social media group has been in contact with Twitter to figure out if it can be changed and whether it's a permanentor temporary fixture.

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One proposal is that Twitter may be able to geotag posts so that Tweets not coming from Africa will avoid having the flag slapped on the hashtag, but it's uncertain that can be done quickly.

A spokesman at National Defence confirmed the instruction has been given,but couldn't say how long it might last.

It's not clear why the hashtag#CAF, which also refers to theConfdration Africaine de Football representing 54 members, prompts an emojifor the flag of the Central African Republic.Officials at Twitter did not respond to a request for comment by CBC News.

With 207,300 followers, @CAF_Online, which encourages everyone to "Celebrate Africa," dwarfs the official @CanadianForces account which has 53,700 followers.

The Central African Republic with a population of 4.6 million has been a country in turmoil almost since its independence from France 1960.

It has been mired in civil war since an Islamic insurgency emerged in 2013.

Possible peacekeeping mission

With United Nations peacekeepers in place, the country has an outside chance of being one of the nations where the Liberal government could consider sending a Canadian military presence.

Defence Minister Harjitt Sajjan is due to conduct a tour of a handfulAfrican countries this month and make a recommendation to cabinet some time later this year.

The Central African Republicdoes not maintain a diplomatic representativein Ottawa, but a spokeswoman for the combined embassy in Washington says it was not aware of the mix-up and that the mission was focused on "more important files."