The fear was reasonable. It was a fear that I also carried. Uncertainty about whether or not I should tell the story now, 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 deserved to be told.
When I set out to chronicle Black Twitter in April 2021, charting its rise, its power, and what I felt was its unquestionable cultural impact, I was, no doubt, attempting to define a community that defies easy definition. In truth, Black Twitter is more than a community. It is an ever-growing and 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’s 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 extraordinary and everyday. It is, as I wrote in 2021, everything: news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury: a comedy performance, a therapy session, and a family cookout all in one.
Even as other platforms like TikTok have attempted to capture what made Twitter what it is (in my opinion, the most important social platform of the 2010s), Black Twitter endures as the most dynamic subset of not just Twitter, now X , but of the broader set. Social Internet (as last week demonstrated, there was no better place to be than Black Twitter while the Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud unfolded).
What’s more, much of black life in the public eye is misrepresented and appropriated. It has become a fantasy, a holiday or something worse: it is assumed dead. The technologies at our disposal have magnified our connection while accelerating our erasure. Our stories are routinely stolen from us, if not removed entirely. Out of our hands, our history is flattened and reused in dangerous falsehoods by legislators who peddle misinformation for personal gain. The Black Twitter story was an account I didn’t want to lose due to the whitewashing of history.
I also knew that the reality of the social Internet is impermanent. The digital gathering places that were once crucial in the 1990s and 2000s (NetNoir, Black Voices, MelaNet, Black Planet, and others) had largely come and gone without proper contextualization. That’s why it was important to give Black Twitter flowers while it still existed, which now seems even more urgent under Elon Musk’s ownership. Everything we built and continue to build on the platform could be gone tomorrow.
After WIRED published the popular history of Black Twitter, I began working on a documentary based on the oral history reports. The resulting three-part series, out today, expands on the original story and also captures the very real fears surrounding what the future of Black Twitter could hold.
So why this story and why now? It’s very simple, really. I didn’t want Black Twitter to be another footnote.