Name: Preserving Black Twitter’s Legacy and Future
Uploaded: 2023-10-27T21:58:00Z
Duration: 14 min 34 s
Description: An effort to archive Black Twitter is underway but recent changes at Twitter, now X, have led to some challenges. This special episode looks at the impact of Black Twitter, the effort to create a record of it, and where some users are moving to continue the community. Zoe Thomas hosts. Image: Storyblocks

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An effort to archive Black Twitter is underway but recent changes at Twitter, now X,  have led to some challenges. This special episode looks at the impact of Black Twitter, the effort to create a record of it, and where some users are moving to continue the community. Zoe Thomas hosts. Image: Storyblocks

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Preserving Black Twitter’s Legacy and Future 

Zoe: Welcome to "Tech News Briefing." It's Friday, October 27th. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. It's been exactly one year since Elon Musk bought Twitter. He's made a lot of changes in that time. He renamed the platform X, did away with the old system for receiving blue check mark verifications, and changed rules around content moderation and the way outside researchers can access the platform's data. Today, we're gonna focus on one of the platform's most influential communities, Black Twitter. The group sparked cultural movements. Its conversations led to people being canceled and fired. It gave us Black Girl Magic and Black Boy Joy and amplified injustices that many Black people face on a daily basis. An effort is underway to archive Black Twitter, but some say that's being made harder by Musk's changes and an exodus by some users. We'll take a look at those challenges and what they mean for preserving that community's history. Remember the 2015 Oscars?

Welcome to the 87th Oscars. Tonight, we honor Hollywood's best and widest, sorry, brightest.

Zoe: Host Neil Patrick Harris kicked off the show by making a joke about the lack of diversity in the nominees. But Harris wasn't the first to raise the issue. It took off on Twitter, thanks to April Reign and her #OscarsSoWhite. Reign was a lawyer and a big movie fan who says she was disappointed in the lack of people of color nominated for Academy Awards that year.

April: At the time, Twitter was the best place to communicate and have these types of discussions, you know, just based on the social media apps that were available at the time. Instagram is more visually focused. Facebook is not one where you can have really a conversation with everyone. It's more you have to choose who your friends are. And so Twitter made sense. Being a member of Black Twitter meant that my post would be seen by Black media outlets initially. And since we're having a conversation about marginalized communities with the #OscarSoWhite, it made it easier to have that conversation because I knew who my community was. I knew who I was talking to. And then, obviously, it became this behemoth that it did, and it went around the world. And then people in Brazil and in France and New Zealand were talking about #OscarSoWhite after a period of time.

Zoe: Entertainment wasn't the only industry affected by conversations that started on Black Twitter. Following the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Eric Gardner, and George Floyd, social justice movements particularly Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name and I Can't Breathe, gained global momentum on and off the platform. Here's our personal tech reporter, Dalvin Brown.

Dalvin: After George Floyd was killed, it was hard to avoid seeing the video on Twitter. It was everywhere. Folks were retweeting it, the media was picking it up. You could see how hurt people were by what happened. And also just like how it sent reverberations throughout the Black community was very apparent on Black Twitter. And not only the gruesome video, but there was a chain reaction of movements after that. There was a period in time where people were really focused on pouring money into Black-owned businesses to show support during that time. And on Twitter is where you would find very nuanced discussions about it because yes, while Black business owners were welcoming and happy and felt like finally people are paying more attention to us, they hated that it was happening on the back of such a tragedy. And so Black Twitter is where I went to find some of those voices and add them to my stories.

Zoe: As a personal tech reporter, and then, you know, also somebody who knows what Twitter, now called X, has been like, how have you seen this space change since Elon Musk took over the platform?

Dalvin: One of the early signs that some people would find troubling was that Elon Musk was reinstating accounts belonging to people who had been banned for hate speech, attacking others on the platform. And so, if you were one of the people who felt safe on Twitter because of the platform's moderation efforts, Elon Musk came in and undid some of that, that might be a sign that you should look elsewhere.

Zoe: So when we're thinking about Black Twitter, should we be thinking about it as something that was or is something that still is, that still exists?

Dalvin: It's complicated. Black Twitter certainly was a force that had a lot of people being active in the discourse for years before Elon Musk took over Twitter. And a lot of those people are still on Twitter. But what we also see is that Black Twitter has been dispersed. A former Twitter executive went on to launch Spill, which is an app that builds itself as a place to discuss culture. Meta recently launched Threads this year in a bid to recreate what was once home to Twitter's discourse.

Zoe: Black Twitter has fueled conversations beyond the platform. Instances of police violence against people of color have gained more attention, and Me Too, a term first coined by a Black woman, Tarana Burke, was reused by actress Alyssa Milano fueling a movement that led to other hashtags, including #MuteRKelly. So how do you make sure these movements and other cultural moments are properly preserved and understood? That's the task of Meredith Clark, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. She's working on a record of Black Twitter and spoke to me about her efforts. So Professor Clark, give us a sense of why you think it's important to make sure there's an archive of what Black Twitter is and was.

Prof. Clark: Well, history has shown us that without the perspectives of the people who create and experience themselves or live through it, we get a skewed sense of our own history. We've seen that where there are narratives from enslaved individuals who tell a very different story than perhaps one of the ones we might find in our history books. And so what we want to do is make sure that the experiences of people who identify themselves as part of Black Twitter, that they're told in their own words and in their own voices.

Zoe: How do you go about archiving this information?

Prof. Clark: One of the ones that I think would immediately come to mind to most folks is just downloading tweets. But now that there have been some changes that restrict how much data you can collect from Twitter, it's a lot harder to do that on a large scale. So then we might think about some of the other ways that people have done preservation work in digital spaces, and that can span everything from screenshots of things that they saw online to web capture with technologies that allow you to see what was on the screen at a certain time, to even oral histories and first person narratives.

Zoe: It's been a year since Elon Musk bought the platform and he's made a number of significant changes, so how is that making you think about how you're going to go about collecting this information?

Prof. Clark: You know, it's very interesting to watch the purchase of a company that had become so central to communication across people and countries and groups, and see that one person's ownership can completely rearrange those relationships. The thing that I want to avoid with a project like archiving Black Twitter is making sure that we don't recreate these stories and not give people a full picture of what it was like to be on the platform, what it was like to be able to interact with others in a particular way, certainly in the way that we cannot do now because of the changes to the platform.

Zoe: As for those changes, they include X charging for access to its API. And for listeners who don't know, that's the tool that lets developers analyze internal data, including tweets and build tools with it. I asked Clark whether those changes might make it difficult to record conversations from the platform.

Prof. Clark: Absolutely. It makes it difficult to even collect the data. If you think about how many tweets are posted to the site every single day, the right program would allow someone to collect hundreds, tens of thousands, maybe even millions depending on the kind of licensing you had. As a researcher with, yes, a bit of a budget, but certainly not tens of thousands or certainly millions of dollars to pay for access to this data, I could collect a few hundred tweets and make something significant out of the data that I found there. I'm no longer able to do that, and many researchers throughout the world who are depending on that kind of access can no longer do it. And so what that means is we have to really rethink how we're going to record these stories, how we're gonna collect the data, how we're gonna store it so that we will be able to use it in the future. And that's a complete revision of the way that we've approached this in the past.

Zoe: How do you think Musk's takeover of Twitter, now X, has changed the way that the platform is used by people of color?

Prof. Clark: Among the people who have participated in my research, among the Black folks primarily in the US and a few throughout the diaspora, people have talked about different ways. They are moving more to different platforms and exploring those platforms as a means of staying connected with the communities that they built online. A good number of them are still there, but they just don't use the platform in the ways that they used to. People are having to put what they see now in a different context because of the lack of verification and the lack of clarity about whose account is real and what information can be trusted.

Zoe: X, formerly Twitter, didn't respond to a request for comment. Since Musk took over Twitter, a number of new rivals have sprung up to challenge its dominance as the global public square.

Terrell: Many platforms are 15, 20 years old at this point. We're overdue for an evolution of social media.

Zoe: Alphonzo Terrell, along with DeVaris Brown, founded Spill. The pair are both former Twitter executives who count themselves among Black Twitter users. Terrell says the goal of Spill was not just to attract people who liked the short form microblogging format, but users who wanted to engage in the kind of cultural conversations that made Black Twitter so influential. And he says problems of discrimination, harassment, and marginalization that exist offline also appear online and are hard to solve on existing platforms.

Terrell: This is a routine challenge because these groups are often the ones that are early adopters. They're heavy users, Black women over index on social media usage more than any other identity group, as well as media consumption often, again getting the most hate and abuse and not getting the credit or the rewards that these communities deserve. So this has been a chronic issue for platforms for a long time. And so, that piece for us was really the cornerstone of, "Hey, if we could solve for this and start with these groups first, that would be game changing."

Zoe: Spill, which launched on Apple's App Store in mid-June, says as of July it had over 200,000 users and a 200,000 person wait list. While looking to the future, Terrell says he sees value in creating an archive of what Black Twitter was.

Terrell: I think it would be a miss to not really take a step back and say, "Wow, this was pretty important from a cultural standpoint." But I think we will miss the bigger issue, which is if we don't actually solve for the problems that created Black Twitter in a lot of instances and most importantly that Black people face, right? Like we cannot separate Black Twitter from Black people. We need to remember that if we care about Black Twitter, we have to care about Black people and really be thinking about how we're putting solutions in place and holding space for community and addressing a lot of the issues that Black Twitter raised to the surface that may not have gotten attention before. Then, I think we're really doing it justice. So yes, let's archive, but let's also not forget that this is about people at the end of the day.

Zoe: All right, that's it for "Tech News Briefing". Today's show was produced by Julie Chang and mixed by Michael Laval. I'm your host, Zoe Thomas. Our supervising producer is Melony Roy. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Our deputy editors are Scott Saloway and Chris Zinsli. And Philana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's Head of News Audio. We'll be back with a new show on Monday. Have a great weekend and thanks for listening.

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