The worry was cheap. 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 contemplate household secrets and techniques, crept into the again of my thoughts. However I knew this story deserved to be instructed.
After 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, trying to outline a group that defies simple definition. In reality, Black Twitter is greater than a group. It’s an ever-growing, always-evolving pressure that has influenced practically each facet of contemporary life.
Black Twitter is the birthplace of all of your favourite memes, hashtags, and developments. 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.
At the same time as different platforms like TikTok have tried to seize what made Twitter what it’s—in my estimation, probably the most vital social platform of the 2010s—Black Twitter endures as probably the most dynamic subset not solely of Twitter, now X, but in addition 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 obtainable 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 among 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 vital that I give Black Twitter its flowers whereas it was nonetheless round, which now appears much more pressing below 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 based mostly on the reporting within the oral historical past. The ensuing three-part sequence, out in the present day, expands on the unique story, and in addition captures the very actual fears surrounding what might 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.
