The fear was reasonable. It was a fear I also worn. The uncertainty about whether or not to tell the story, and whether or not it was right to reveal what many consider family secrets, crept into the back of my mind. But I knew this story was worth telling.
When I set out chronicle Black Twitter in April 2021 – charting its rise and power and what I thought was its undeniable cultural impact – I was, admittedly, trying to define a community that is not easy to define. In reality, Black Twitter is more than a community. It is an ever-growing, ever-evolving force that has influenced almost every aspect of modern life.
Black Twitter is the birthplace of all your favorite memes, hashtags, and trends. It is also more than that: Black Twitter not only creates culture, it shapes society. From Barack Obama's historic presidency to hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite, #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackLivesMatter, Black Twitter is both the extraordinary and the mundane. It's like me wrote in 2021all things news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury – a comedy showcase, therapy session and family cookout all in one.
Even the way other platforms like it TikTok have tried to capture what made Twitter what it is – in my opinion the most important social platform of the 2010s – Black Twitter remains the most dynamic subset of not only Twitter, now last week it turned out that there was no better place to be than Black Twitter Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef played out).
Furthermore, much of black life is in the public eye misrepresented and appropriated. Are twisted into fantasy, festive or worse – left for dead. The technologies available to us have increased our connection, just as they have accelerated our erasure. Our stories are routinely stolen from us, if not immediately deleted. Our history is being crushed and reused at our hands dangerous untruths by lawmakers spreading disinformation for personal gain. The story of Black Twitter was an account I didn't want to lose to the whitewashing of history.
I also knew that the reality of the social internet is one of transience. Once-pivotal digital gathering spaces of the 1990s and 2000s—NetNoir, Black Voices, MelaNet, Black Planet, and others—had largely come and gone without proper contextualization. So it was important that I gave Black Twitter its flowers while it still existed, which seems even more urgent now under Elon Musk's ownership. Everything we built and continue to build on the platform could be gone tomorrow.
After WIRED published the people's history of Black Twitter, I started working on a documentary based on the oral history reporting. The resulting three-part series, out today, expands on the original story while also capturing the very real fears surrounding what could lie in Black Twitter's future.
Why this story, and why now? It's actually very simple. I didn't want Black Twitter to be a footnote anymore.