André Wheeler 

Ten years of Black Twitter: a merciless watchdog for problematic behavior

From Black Lives Matter to #OscarsSoWhite, the decade would not have been the same without black voices on social media
  
  

A decade of Black Twitter – memes and Kanye and so much more.
A decade of Black Twitter – memes and Kanye and so much more. Illustration: Thais Silva/The Guardian

There is power in numbers. No internet subsection displayed this fact better than Black Twitter, which touched nearly every sphere of American culture and politics this decade.

In the 2010s Black Twitter become a cultural force to be reckoned with. It promoted Black Lives Matter and raised awareness around the tragic deaths of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner through hashtags such as #SayHerName and #ICantBreathe. Its anger over Kevin Hart’s homophobic tweets pressured him to drop out as a host for the 2018 Oscars ceremony. It pressured Pepsi to retract and apologize for a Kendall Jenner-fronted commercial accused of co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement. It created hundreds of delightfully viral moments such as “eyebrows on fleek”. And it helped a wild 180-tweet thread – in which a stripper recounts an adventure-filled road trip to Florida – become an A24-produced, feature-length film.

“I would absolutely say this decade wouldn’t be the same without Black Twitter,” says the UVA professor Meredith D Clark, who is currently writing a book on the internet subsection. “But I also think it was a continuation of our larger relationship with black American communities. Black culture has been actively mined for hundreds of years for influences on mainstream American culture.”

The thrill and intrigue of scrolling through Black Twitter often crossed cultural and racial lines. “At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by the Internet, I cannot keep quiet about my obsession with Late Night Black People Twitter, an obsession I know some of you other white people share, because it is awesome,” Choire Sicha wrote for The Awl in 2010, before “Black Twitter” had become the accepted moniker.

Defining Black Twitter continues to be difficult. The meaning is slightly amorphous, but it refers to a particular collective of black identities and voices on Twitter taking part in collective, culturally specific jokes and dialogues that affect the community – from discussing colorism to dishing out jokes about common “black mom” phrases.

The Georgia Tech professor André Brock says Black Twitter allowed mainstream, white culture an unprecedented glimpse at how black people talk and joke among each other. “It was one of the first spaces that white people could see how creative black people are with our discourse, and how we used a technology that wasn’t originally designed for us.”

One of the first viral Black Twitter moments of the decade came in response to the documentary Kony 2012, a 30-minute YouTube film that looked at the kidnappings of Ugandan children by a guerrilla group and efforts to find them. The video received over 120m views in only five days and redefined what “virality” meant, with donations towards the cause quickly surging.

However, members of Black Twitter were some of the first to criticize Invisible Children, the charity behind the film, for its sources of funding and misleading reporting. The critiques were surprisingly nuanced for a social media space, some citing the call for donations as another incident of “slacktivism”, a term used for low-scale, “feel-good” displays of charity. Invisible Children’s campaign quickly faded in popularity, and the charity later struggled to survive after its viral moment.

This would be the power of Black Twitter over the course of the decade – a diligent, occasionally merciless watchdog for problematic behavior.

Calling out cultural appropriation was a chief focus of the space in the early 2010s. Celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kendall Jenner and Miley Cyrus were critiqued (and roasted) for adopting traditionally black hairstyles and/or dances. Its ability to prevent major business deals would also be flexed. In 2013, Black Twitter’s outrage was largely responsible for corporations ending their affiliations with chef Paula Deen after she admitted to using the N-word. Later, a juror from the 2013 George Zimmerman trial lost out on a major book deal when Black Twitter voiced disapproval. Users were able to directly put pressure on the juror’s literary agent, Sharlene Martin. “You know that the stains from blood money don’t wash off, right?” one user wrote at the time.

Here are just some of the celebrities and companies Black Twitter “cancelled” this decade: Roseanne, Pepsi, Meghan McCain, Gucci, Don Lemon, Iggy Azalea, Karamo Brown, Jeffree Star, Jussie Smollett, Kevin Hart, Kanye West, TI, Jay-Z, the NFL, Gina Rodriguez, Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Brown, Matt Damon.

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Brock says the litany of “cancellations” that occurred on Black Twitter this decade were not simply rooted in anger and outrage, as media outlets frequently depicted them. They were moments of catharsis. “People who have been affronted or hurt or wounded finally had a voice to make gatekeepers take notice,” he says.

Clark says the subsection is not a monolith, but actually composed of numerous, small personal communities and networks, which then band together “when an incendiary event or something that triggers discussion occurs”.

Clark argues the term Black Twitter often led to racial biases (ie, depictions of the group as an “angry mob”) during media coverage. “Whenever you put ‘black’ in front of anything, people think it’s deviant from what’s mainstream. I think that led to a lot of confusion for folks who were outside of Black Twitter. The term doesn’t necessarily signal the cultural richness we found within the space.”

Black Twitter has its roots in the low-tech forums and blogs of the early aughts.

Brock says, before 2010, black-centric blogs would try to pressure mainstream media into covering underreported topics, like 2006’s Jena Six case (which saw activists protesting against the excessive charges six black boys faced for beating a white classmate). Lipstick Alley, BlackPlanet, OkayPlayer, Crunk and Disorderly – these sites were digital watering holes for early black internet users. However, their presence was nowhere near the scale or visibility of Black Twitter.

“Blogs couldn’t talk back to media in real time the same way Twitter can,” Brock says. “That ability to talk back to corporations and media, and for the talk back to be visible is what distinguishes Black Twitter from previous incidents of black communities online.”

During the 2010s, Black Twitter would prevent the tragic deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and too many others from being glossed over by news outlets. It proved the power of a hashtag through well-crafted digital campaigns. One study found that the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was used over 1.7m times in the three weeks following a grand jury’s decision not to indict the cop who killed Michael Brown.

However, there were downsides to the immense attention.

April Reign, who started the popular #OscarsSoWhite campaign, says media companies often surveilled the space, looking for ways to report on the black community without actually engaging with it. “It’s hard when you see someone who is having a profound discussion about a particular issue, and a media outlet will extract all these tweets and put a sentence at the end and call it an article,” she says. “That person got paid for ‘writing the story’ and the media outlet got paid through advertising dollars for someone else’s tweets. The person who wrote the tweets never sees a dime.”

This would be a frequent problem throughout the decade, brands adopting popular phrases and jokes born in the space for advertisements. At 16, Kayla Newman had her “eyebrows on fleek” saying popularized through a recirculated Vine video and became slang for “flawless” and “perfection”. Kayla’s unique saying was used by brands like Domino’s, Ihop and Denny’s in advertising – without her ever seeing a dime.

“I gave the world a word,” Kayla Newman told the writer Doreen St Felix in 2015. “I can’t explain the feeling. At the moment I haven’t gotten any endorsements or received any payment. I feel that I should be compensated. But I also feel that good things happen to those who wait.”

There would be numerous occasions where Black Twitter’s lexicon provided new terms for popular culture: “thot”, “bae”, “cuffing season”, “throwing shade”, “lit”, “turnt up”. The exchanges were fun (even if they were often misused by white people), until companies began using the slang to sell T-shirts and other miscellaneous products online.

Of course, there were also major winners from the space. For the lucky, success on Black Twitter could be monetized. Lil Nas X – who broke boundaries as an out gay, black man in rap and country – mastered the arts of memes, retweets and follows to make his song Old Town Road an unexpected viral hit. Lil Nas X was allegedly able to go from running a Nicki Minaj stan account, under the handle @NasMaraj, to Grammy-nominated artist. (Lil Nas X has not confirmed running @NasMaraj, despite reporting, urls and time stamps strongly suggesting he did.)

Meanwhile, the social media accounts of fast-food chains like Popeyes and Wendy’s connected with audiences – and sold product – through lifting phrases and slang from black and gay communities on Twitter.

Elsewhere, the comedian Shiggy became an internet star when he danced to Drake’s In My Feelings record, creating the dance challenge of 2018 and later appearing in the rapper’s video for the track.

As 2019 comes to an end, the power of Black Twitter is being demonstrated through the 2020 presidential campaigns. Joe Biden’s story about CornPop, a racially charged pool confrontation in the 60s, provided the basis for numerous memes. Kamala Harris’s virality on Black Twitter was so strong that Maya Rudolph, while impersonating Harris on SNL, joked “Mama needs a GIF!” to boost her poll numbers. And conversations about reparations – once thought of as a far-fetched, in-group topic – were held by major candidates.

Brock believes the outsized influence and visibility of Black Twitter will continue through the 2020s. “As much as people complain about Twitter, it has a mindshare wildly out of proportion with its user base,” he explains. “I don’t see a service that offers that same level of access, distribution and open conversation on the horizon.”

 

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