The book "#HashtagActivism" is a robust and thorough defense of its namesake practice. It argues that Twitter disintermediated public discourse, analyzing networks of user interactions in that context. But the book overlooks that Twitter is actually a heavy-handed intermediary. Twitter imposes strict requirements on content, like a character limit, and controls who sees what and in what context. Reintroducing Twitter as the medium and reinterpreting the analysis exposes serious flaws. Similarly, their defense of hashtag activism relies almost exclusively on Twitter engagement data, but offers no theory of change stemming from that engagement. By reexamining their evidence, I argue that hashtag activism is not just ineffective, but its institutional dynamics are structurally conservative and inherently anti-democratic.