'Black Twitter: A People's History' Review: A Solid Hulu Primer

When “A Folk History of Black Twitter” was published in 2021, the social media platform seemed more powerful than ever. As had been the case for more than a decade, the site was a center of community and influence, where users could chat with friends, organize with activists, read and report news in real time, and perhaps even gain attention of a celebrity or two. Sure, it had its problems with trolls or bots or poor moderation; Sure, TikTok came in quickly. But Twitter seemed, if not thriving, at least trudging along, with no clear end in sight.

However, a lot can change in three years – and a lot has changed, especially since Elon Musk took over the site in 2022. Onyx Collective'S Black Twitter: The History of a People repeats and expands on Jason Parham's Wired article, which draws together interviews with journalists, comedians and other commentators to trace the rise of a revolution and its lasting effect. But from the perspective of 2024, the series takes on a more reflective tenor: a look back at a time recently passed, rather than an attempt to document a story that is still unfolding.

While black users have been on Twitter for as long as Twitter has existed, both Parham and Black Twitter director Prentice Penny (Insecure) pins the start of Black Twitter as a distinct phenomenon around 2009, with Ashley Weatherspoon's #UKnowUrBlackWhen as one of the first unifying viral moments. From there, the documentary follows a path loosely organized by chronology and theme.

The first episode focuses on the early days of the community and its lighter side: the jokes, the viewing parties, the celebrity feuds, the crafty discussions (who could forget that?) Zola?). The second charts the evolution of Black Twitter into a tool for real-world change, through movements like Black Lives Matter and #OscarsSoWhite. The third covers Twitter's last gasp of relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its subsequent slide into Musk's scrappier, seamier Black Lives Matter are underlined. protests or drawing parallels between white flight and the departure of white people from the 'ghetto' of MySpace to the closed community of Facebook.

With so much ground to cover, Black Twitter can only scratch the surface of all the complex, interconnected ideas therein. There just isn't enough time in three hours for the thorough dissection of the history suggested by a statement like “I think black people figured out a long time ago that sometimes people can't hear us when we're desperate and when we be desperate. they are serious, but they can hear us when we bend our truths with wit and humor,” said journalist Wesley Lowery. Or to fully map out the mechanisms by which queer Black language is incorporated into generic internet jargon, as noted by Jamelle Dooley, a participant in one of the groups' occasional “kickback” segments.

Anyone wanting to dig further down those rabbit holes will have to do their own research; by the time you've formulated further questions, the show has already moved on to the next topic. But if Black Twitter isn't much for deep dives, it's effective as a primer for anyone still trying to wrap their minds around the sheer breadth of its central topic – which, so soon after the golden age of Black Twitter, is probably true for most people .

Penny even integrates the experience of the platform into the series itself, with a rhythm and visual style that evokes the endless scroll. The points made by the interviewees are illustrated in video memes, clips, 140-character jokes and punctuated by gifs of Kombucha girl or Supa Hot Fire. One-on-one interviews are conducted in sets dressed to evoke a barbershop, an airport or a campaign office – which not only adds visual interest to the otherwise familiar talking head format, but reminds us that Black Twitter is everywhere where there are black people. .

Penny is at pains to emphasize that the community it describes is not a monolith. The topics rattle off a dizzying array of subcategories, from HBCU Twitter to NBA Twitter to Blackademic Twitter, and so on. And she is aware that these different cliques are not always connected. The third chapter addresses issues of queerphobia and misogyny within Black Twitter, though the series moves on as usual before these thorny topics can be fully interrogated.

Yet it finds a common thread within this messy collective. It runs from the platform's early call to what author Luvvie Ajayi Jones describes as “a megaphone for people on the margins,” where Black people can go to demand justice, live-tweet a favorite drama, or simply express themselves are – and then eventually turns into a tool for the backlash, led by reactionaries like Donald Trump or Musk, who saw the place as the power base it had become. (Black Twitter rightly scrutinizes Musk's bigoted views, but the most hilariously cruel criticism is also the simplest: “He's just not cool,” former Twitter director God-is Rivera mocks.)

Penny, like Parham, seems to have the long term in mind in capturing an era as it occurs so that it is not forgotten after it is gone. It's essential work, especially given that social media is almost inherently ephemeral: writer Ira Madison III at one point mentions the wave of “fairly uncited 'articles'” from the mid-2010s that lifted things straight from Black Twitter ', but dig all of those tweet roundups now and you'll probably end up with broken links and failed embeds.

However, if messages are not forever, the impact they have can be significant. “Black Twitter was really the foundation of the evolution of social influence as we see it today: the way we joke, the way we roast, the way we push for responsibility on the internet in general,” says Rivera. the docuseries makes it convincingly clear that she is right. Black Twitter It may be too broad, too short, and too early to serve as a definitive account of this movement. But it's a compelling first chapter in what is sure to be a long and lively conversation.