‘Black Twitter’ looks at who gave the platform its voice
WHO created Twitter?
On one level, the business level, the Wikipedia level, the answer is simple: Twitter, a social-media service allowing users to post brief messages, was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
But on the level of culture, the people who “create” a social platform – that is, who decide what it’s for, what it can do, how it feels – are the people who use it. Black Twitter: A People’s History, which premiered Thursday on Hulu, argues that it was Black users who, as much as or more than anyone, gave Twitter its voice.
A couple of caveats are useful here. Though Twitter, now called X, is a global infosystem with worldwide effects, the three-part documentary, based on a Wired oral history by Jason Parham, focuses on Twitter as an American phenomenon. And Black Twitter, the series is careful to point out, isn’t a monolith or formal group but the more general phenomenon of Blackness and Black culture manifesting online.
Black Twitter treats the network not mainly as technology or business but as a cultural artifact – a platform, even an art form, for commentary, community and comedy. Twitter, it argues, is another part of American culture, like music and food, that Black Americans defined by coming to it from the margins.
“In the same way that we took our lamentations and made gospel music, we took a site like Twitter and we made it a storytelling forum,” Meredith Clark, a journalism professor undertaking an archive of Black Twitter, says in the documentary. Or as comedian Baratunde Thurston pithily puts it: “We repurposed Twitter the way we repurposed chitlins.”
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This scaffolding of ideas elevates Black Twitter above the kind of remember-this, remember-that pop-history documentary that it can resemble on the surface. Appropriate to its subject, it tells its story in a series of small bites. It stitches together interviews with academics, journalists, entertainers, viral stars, and figures from business and politics with a nimble narration by the director, Prentice Penny.
Twitter had jokes, but the jokes could also have purpose, as when the tag #OscarsSoWhite crystallised a protest against a lack of diversity in Hollywood’s award and reward systems.
Hashtagging was one way, Black Twitter argues, that Black users shaped Twitter’s vernacular. Another was through memes, which allowed a layered visual vocabulary for mood, irony, emotion and attitude. Black people, the documentary argues, were pioneers of memes-as-language and often the faces of it: Michael Jackson munching popcorn (to convey excited spectatorship), James Harden eye-rolling away from an interviewer (wry dismissal), Donald Glover walking into a burning room (surprised horror) and the Pietà of memes, Crying Jordan.
Like any social platform, Twitter is people; its history is human history. So Black Twitter doubles as a social history of America from the beginning of the Barack Obama era to the aftermath (and resumption?) of the Donald Trump era, an arc of hope to disillusionment to acrimony. It begins nostalgically, with the election of the first Black president (who was also an early Twitter adopter) and memories of over-the-top online beefs and “Scandal” watch parties.
With the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, Black Twitter served as a crowdsourced information network and protest forum. The hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown invited Black users to post pairs of photos of themselves, grimly satirising the tendency of media outlets to choose the most menacing images of Black people shot by police.
The rest of Black Twitter is (recent) history: the element of racial backlash around Trump’s election; Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests; the pandemic; BBQ Becky and Permit Patty; and the Jan 6 attackers at the Capitol. Eventually, Elon Musk buys the platform, reinstates banned accounts and presides over a toxic spill of hate speech. (Most recently Musk restored the account of white supremacist Nick Fuentes.)
Black Twitter: A People’s History doesn’t have grand predictions about what comes next. But it’s an engagingly specific snapshot of the Twitter era and the social period it overlapped with: a time that was serious even when it was silly, that was fun until it wasn’t. NYT
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