Black Twitter
[1][2][3][4] Feminista Jones described it in Salon as "a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community proving adept at bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes.
"[16] An August 2010 article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate, "How Black People Use Twitter," brought the community to wider attention.
[1] Manjoo wrote that young black people appeared to use Twitter in a particular way: "They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users.
"[18] Manjoo cited Brendan Meeder of Carnegie Mellon University, who argued that the high level of reciprocity between the many users who initiate hashtags (or "blacktags") leads to a high-density, influential network.
[18] A 2014 dissertation by Meredith Clark explains that users on Black Twitter began to use hashtags as a way to attract members of society with similar ideals to a single conversation in order to interact with each other and feel as though they are engaged in a “safe space”.
She stated that hashtags have transitioned from serving as a method of setting up a conversation between separate parties to an underlying reason behind how users outside Black Twitter learn about the thoughts and feelings of African Americans in the present world.
She concluded that large parts of the article had generalized too much, and published a response to it titled "Why 'They' Don't Understand What Black People Do On Twitter."
[17] According to Shani O. Hilton writing in 2013, the defining characteristic of Black Twitter is that its members "a) are interested in issues of race in the news and pop culture and b) tweet A LOT."
"[20] Apryl Williams and Doris Domoszlai (2013) similarly state, "There is no single identity or set of characteristics that define Black Twitter.
"[4] Feminista Jones has argued that Black Twitter's historical cultural roots are the spirituals, or work songs, sung by enslaved people in the United States, when finding a universal means of communication was essential to survival and grassroots organization.
This rejection of a post-racial society gets tied into the collective practices of performance by turning narratives such as the Republican National Committee's declaration of Rosa Parks ending racism[22] into a moment of critique and ridicule under the guise of a game.
[24] According to Thurston, the brevity of tweets and the instant feedback mean Twitter fits well into the African tradition of call and response.
[32] With Black women spending a lot of time on social media, their resistance to white supremacy and creating counter-narratives can be seen through hashtags developed like #BlackGirlMagic, #BlackGirlsMatter, etc. "
Social media has become a crucial space for discussing, dismantling, and organizing against anti-Black racism for young Black women.
"[30] Having been the topic of a 2012 SXSW Interactive panel led by Kimberly Ellis,[34][35] Black Twitter came to wider public attention in July 2013, when it was credited with having stopped a book deal between a Seattle literary agent and one of the jurors in the trial of George Zimmerman.
[20][38] The community was also involved in June 2013 in protesting to companies selling products by Paula Deen, the celebrity chef, after she was accused of racism, reportedly resulting in the loss of millions of dollars' worth of business.
[43][44] Barr explained that she was "ambien tweeting" when she compared former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to the "spawn" of "Muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.
[48] In 2022, Black Twitter was credited with prompting national media coverage of the killing of Shanquella Robinson, a young American woman who mysteriously died in Mexico.
[...] When I launched the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, I thought it would largely be a discussion between people impacted by the latest bout of problematic behavior from mainstream white feminists.
"[51] After Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed resident Michael Brown, an attorney from Jackson, Mississippi named CJ Lawrence tweeted a photo of himself speaking at his commencement at Tougaloo College with former President Bill Clinton laughing in the background and a second photo of himself holding a bottle of Hennessy and a microphone.
This was a direct criticism of the way Black victims of police violence were portrayed in media, with the assassination of their characters as a result of the choices of images used to depict them.
The hashtag made in fun was used to offer a counter argument to the view the Beatles and other white popular music figures are more culturally relevant than their black counterparts.
With the growing tweets following the BLM movement police brutality was one of the major themes that struck the black culture.
"I can't breathe" were Garner's final words and can be heard in the video footage of the arrest that led to his death.
As Dr. Marc Lamont Hill puts it, "These efforts, anchored by the hashtags #MichaelBrown, #Ferguson, and #HandsUpDontShoot, transformed Brown’s death from a local event to an international cause.
The suit, filed by one-time prospective student Abigail Fisher, alleged that she was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin because she was white, and that other, less qualified candidates were admitted because of their race.
[citation needed] One example is the tweets made after rapper Tyga was pictured with the transgender porn actress Mia Isabella.
[6] In a country that has 11 official languages, Black Twitter users regularly embedded words from isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Sesotho in their tweets.
It started with a student-led protest movement that began in mid October 2015 in response to an increase in fees at South African universities.
Black women took to the social media platform to address numerous issues such as rape, patriarchy and domestic violence.
