By Evette Dionne
Once an epicenter of Black culture, X is now more like a sundown town.
X the platform formerly known as Twitter, still exists more than a year after Elon Musk acquired it, but it’s a shell of its former self.
Rather than a real-time feed chronicling everything from world events to random inside jokes and debates, X is attempting to be everything to everyone through a series of supposed “innovations.”
There’s Twitter Blue, a fledgling program that offers enhanced features, including verification, for a fee; a nascent banking section for those who want to make financial transactions on X; and even a “for you” timeline that’s supposed to algorithmically predict what you want to see based on your previous activity.
What X has actually become is a nightmare.
X has lost its spirit because it has lost a large swath of its most thriving embodiment of cultural connection: Black Twitter.
Black Twitter has a different meaning depending on whom you ask. But Meredith D. Clark, an associate professor at Northeastern University who’s extensively studied Black Twitter, defines it as “a network of culturally linked communicators who are using the platform to talk about issues of concern to Black life and in Black life.” After spending more than a decade as an active member of Black Twitter, I would define it as a vibrant, brilliant, culture-making community comprising some of the funniest people the internet has ever encountered.
While Black people have always been present on and used the internet to build community, Twitter was unique in its ability to attract Black users. As Clark notes, between 2010 and 2013, nearly 25% of all Black people in the United States who were online were also using Twitter. Of course, other subcommunities on Twitter—Asian American Twitter, Feminist Twitter, NBA Twitter—overlapped with Black Twitter, like Venn diagrams of culture-makers. If a subculture existed, it likely thrived on Twitter, even when that group faced rampant discrimination and invisibility offline.
At its peak, Black Twitter users were sharing intracultural jokes, debating which restaurants were appropriate for a first date, and injecting nuance into conversations that began feeling a little too black and white. If Twitter didn’t exist in 2014, when police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Mike Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, would we have received real-time updates from on-the-ground organizers about the militarized police violence they were experiencing? Likely not, given that mainstream news media, most of which wasn’t in Ferguson, often depicted Brown as the aggressor rather than the victim. In fact, it took three days for mainstream media outlets to report an alternate version of events that differed from the official police narrative.
And Black Twitter users could chew gum and walk at the same time: There were inside jokes (one specific user always deactivated around Thanksgiving to avoid them), a shared language, and a beautiful sense of belonging. “Black Twitter … is held together by varying degrees of a sense of community,” Clark wrote in 2018. “Those who want to engage in meaningful interaction with Black Twitter should consider that doing so is akin to walking into a neighborhood.”
X, as it exists now, is more of a sundown town than a safe neighborhood for people from marginalized communities. It’s full of far-right users, many of whom have paid for verification and are thus amplified by the algorithm. Since Musk’s takeover, there’s been an increase in hate speech, which has driven many users, including me, from the platform. One of the epicenters of Black thought, where hashtags like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and #YourSlipIsShowing raised a generation of critical thinkers, has been mostly extinguished.
There are pockets of genius still shining through, as we’ve seen with the Montgomery Brawl memes, but, for the most part, I am left wondering: What will become of Black Twitter? We’re now spread across the internet, popping up on platforms ranging from Spoutible to Bluesky. But there may never again be a single platform where Black users not only dictate the language and the pace of conversation but also help elevate that discussion to a national level.
It’s a loss not only for the members of Black Twitter who used the platform to build camaraderie, but for all of us. Whether you were a member of the community or an outside observer, those who witnessed this cadre of thought at its peak can often approach social issues with more nuance and thoughtfulness because we were all learning in real time, together. Many of us have benefitted from the learning, and, as Clark notes, we must archive those tweets so they are not lost to history.
Clark is overseeing the Archiving Black Twitter project, which aims to “empower social media users who make up Black Twitter to create their own ‘small histories’ from their data.”
“I want for a student, or someone who is just plainly curious, who wants to dig into these histories and this knowledge 50, 75, 100, hell, even five years from now, to be able to access this and say, ‘There is data, there is proof, there’s already a web of knowledge that’s out there about this,’” she told The 19th in 2023.
In the meantime, as social media users attempt to find new digital neighborhoods where they can rebuild communities, we can still look to Black Twitter as a shining example of what connection can do for us—bring us together, make us think, and maybe, most importantly, make us laugh and laugh and laugh.
This article was originally published in Yes Magazine.
