The worry was affordable. It was a worry I additionally carried. Uncertainty about whether or not or not I ought to inform the story now, and whether or not or not it was proper to air what many think about household secrets and techniques, crept into the again of my thoughts. However I knew this story deserved to be advised.
Once I got down to chronicle Black Twitter in April 2021—charting its rise, energy, and what I felt was its unquestionable cultural influence—I used to be, admittedly, making an attempt to outline a neighborhood that defies simple definition. In fact, Black Twitter is greater than a neighborhood. It’s an ever-growing, always-evolving pressure that has influenced practically each side of recent life.
Black Twitter is the birthplace of all of your favourite memes, hashtags, and tendencies. It’s greater than that, too: Black Twitter doesn’t merely make tradition; it shapes society. From the history-setting presidency of Barack Obama to hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite, #BlackGirlMagic, and #BlackLivesMatter, Black Twitter is each the extraordinary and the on a regular basis. It’s, as I wrote in 2021, all of the issues: information and evaluation, name and response, choose and jury—a comedy showcase, remedy session, and household cookout multi functional.
Whilst different platforms like TikTok have tried to seize what made Twitter what it’s—in my estimation, essentially the most important social platform of the 2010s—Black Twitter endures as essentially the most dynamic subset not solely of Twitter, now X, but additionally of the broader social web (as final week proved, there was no higher place to be than Black Twitter because the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef performed out).
What’s extra, a lot of Black life in public view is misrepresented and appropriated. It’s twisted into fantasy or fetish, or worse—left for lifeless. The applied sciences accessible to us have magnified our connection simply as they’ve quickened our erasure. Our tales are routinely stolen from us, if not deleted outright. Out of our palms, our historical past is flattened and repurposed into harmful falsehoods by lawmakers who peddle misinformation for private acquire. The story of Black Twitter was one account I didn’t need to lose to the whitewashing of historical past.
I additionally knew that the truth of the social web is one in every of impermanence. As soon as-crucial digital gathering spots from the Nineties and 2000s—NetNoir, Black Voices, MelaNet, Black Planet, and others—had come and gone largely with out correct contextualizing. So it was necessary that I give Black Twitter its flowers whereas it was nonetheless round, which now appears much more pressing beneath the possession of Elon Musk. All that we constructed, and proceed to construct on the platform, could possibly be gone tomorrow.
After WIRED printed the individuals’s historical past of Black Twitter, I started engaged on a documentary primarily based on the reporting within the oral historical past. The ensuing three-part collection, out right this moment, expands on the unique story, and in addition captures the very actual fears surrounding what may lie in Black Twitter’s future.
So why this story, and why now? It’s easy, actually. I didn’t need Black Twitter to be one other footnote.