In order to be able to detect RT of a particular tweet, I plan to store hashes of each formatted tweet in the database.
What hashing algorithm should I use. Cryptic is of course not essential. Just a minimal way of storing a data as something which can then be compared if it is the same, in an efficient way.
My first attempt at this was by using md5 hashes. But I figured there can be hashing algorithms that are much more efficient, as security is not required.
Do you really need to hash at all?  Twitter messages are short enough (and disk space cheap enough) that it may be better to just store the whole message, rather than eating up clock cycles to hash it.
Detecting Retweets using computationally inexpensive Python hashing algorithms