Twitter may have officially become X, but Black Twitter has held onto its name—and it still fits perfectly.
This is a community that tweets and chirps with real vibrancy, a distinct voice that raises important issues, calls out discrimination and inequality, and beyond that, brings a sense of humor and cultural flair that is entirely its own.
Sociologist, professor and cultural critic Tressie McMillan Cottom perhaps described it best in an opinion piece for the New York Times. “Black Twitter is not a place or a group of people,” she wrote, “but a set of communication practices, like signifying and call and response. It is also a group of knowledges—for instance, a genealogy of misogynoir. And it includes shared language, culture and references.”
“Above all,” she argued, “Black Twitter is a repository, as when it archives public memory of cultural events. Black Twitter is instrumental to the platform’s cultural significance; to be good at Twitter is to borrow aspects of that Black sociolinguistic practice but make it feel authentic.”
The history of Black Twitter is distinctly intertwined with the history of Twitter itself. The website launched in 2006. According to Wired, around that same time, early web forums like BlackVoices, Melanet, and NetNoir were fizzling out, leaving online spaces that catered to Black interests increasingly scarce.
BlackPlanet and MySpace failed to fill the void, and Facebook didn’t quite capture the energy of real-time conversation. Users were looking for something new, and Twitter became it.
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What accelerated its growth were the moments that brought the community together. When Barack Obama ran for his first term, people wanted somewhere to talk about it.
CaShawn Thompson, an educator, told Wired: “I wasn’t on until October ’08, when we were getting ready to elect Obama to his first term. I wanted to know what was going on, and I heard about Twitter.”
Jamilah Lemieux, a Slate columnist, felt the same way: “I joined the day after Obama won.”
Then on June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson was checked into a hospital in Los Angeles. Denver Sean, editor of LoveBScott.com, recalled the moment to Wired: “I was standing in line for Transformers at a movie theater in Atlanta when the news broke. Everybody was just staring at their phones. You could hear little Twitter chimes popping off. It was the most surreal thing.”
As the idea of Black Twitter took hold, celebrities and artists joined in, drawing more attention and more users to the platform.
By 2010, according to Pew Research Center, the Black community was the most active on the website in the US—African-American and Latino adult internet users were twice as likely as white users to be on Twitter.
That same year, Edison Research found that more Black celebrities than white were active on the platform. Shaquille O’Neal, Oprah, 50 Cent, and P Diddy were among the most followed accounts on the site.
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