Black Twitter

Black Twitter is a Twitter subculture that highlights issues of interest to the black community, particularly in the United States. Feminista Jones described it in Salon as "a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community ... [and are] proving adept at bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes." It is also emerging as an influential network in South Africa.

Early description

As of June 2011, according to the Pew Research Center, 25 percent of African Americans who use the Internet use Twitter – compared to nine percent of online white Americans – and one in ten visit it every day. The section of the black community identified as Black Twitter tends to consist of younger African Americans.

The community was first named – as "Late Night Black People Twitter" and "Black People Twitter" – by Choire Sicha, co-founder of the current-affairs website The Awl, in a November 2009 article, "What Were Black People Talking About on Twitter Last Night?". He wrote that it was "huge, organic and ... seemingly seriously nocturnal" – in fact, active around the clock – so that when white Americans wake up, the trending topics are "hilarious chat-memes," and not the "white and boring" Twitter that happens during the day.

Nature of the community

Blacktags

Journalist Farhad Manjoo was one of the first to write about Black Twitter.

Further information: Hashtag

An August 2010 article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate, "How Black People Use Twitter," brought the community to wider attention. 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."

Manjoo referred to the hashtags the black community uses as "blacktags," citing Baratunde Thurston, then of The Onion, who argued that blacktags are a version of The Dozens, a game popular with African Americans, where participants outdo each other by throwing insults back and forth; according to Thurston, the brevity of tweets and the instant feedback mean Twitter fits well into the African tradition of call and response. Manjoo also cited Brendan Meeder of Carnegie Mellon University, who argued that the high level of reciprocity between the hundreds of users who initiate blacktags – who tend to follow anyone who follows them – leads to a high-density, influential network.

Signifyin'

Further information: Signifyin'

Feminista Jones has argued that Black Twitter's roots are the spirituals, or work songs, sung by slaves in the United States, when finding a universal means of communication was essential to survival and grassroots organization. Several writers see Black Twitter interaction as a form of signifyin'. According to André Brock of the University of Iowa, the Black Tweeter is the signifier, while the hashtag is signifier, sign and signified, "marking ... the concept to be signified, the cultural context within which the tweet should be understood, and the 'call' awaiting a response." He writes: "Tweet-as-signifyin', then, can be understood as a discursive, public performance of Black identity."

Sarah Florini of UW-Madison also interprets Black Twitter within the context of signifyin'. She writes that race is normally "deeply tied to corporeal signifiers"; in the absence of the body, black users display their racial identities through wordplay and other language that shows knowledge of black culture. Black Twitter has become an important platform for this performance.

Influence

Black Twitter came to mainstream 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. Zimmerman was controversially acquitted that month of charges stemming from the death of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, in Florida in February 2012. Black Twitter's swift response to the juror's proposed book brought the community to the attention of CNN.

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.

South Africa

The phenomenon is emerging as an influential network in South Africa too; Kenichi Serino writes in The Christian Science Monitor that users regularly include words from Zulu, isiXhosa, and Sesotho in their tweets. It is still a middle-class activity in that country, where just 21 percent have access to the Internet.

Further

• Arceneaux, Michael. "The Miseducation of Black Twitter: Why It's Not What You Think", ComplexTech, 20 December 2012.
• Crutchfield, Abby. "#BlackBuzzFeed and the power of 'Black Twitter'", MSN News, 17 July 2013.
• Greenfield, Rebecca. "Why Conservatives Love Black Twitter", The Atlantic Wire, 18 July 2013.