History of the Black Twitter People, Part I.

Near the end In 2009, he was elected the first black man for the U.S. presidency in the twilight months of the decade, in a young app called Ashley Weatherspoon that followed virality Twitter. Personal assistant to singer Adrienne Bailon, a former member of the pop groups 3LW and Cheetah Girls, she used to work on social media strategy at Weatherspoon. They’ve been testing the hashtags in their feeds for weeks and Bailon to see what connection they would have with the fans. It has been a light success #EzagutuNorLagunakIngurutxoa When. Later, in a car around Manhattan, they started playing with # UKnowUrFromNewYorkWhen. “We started making ham,” Weatherspoon told me when we spoke on the phone in June. As the two women laughed and joked, an even better idea came to Weatherspoon’s mind. “Then I said, oh, you know you’re black …”

It was the first Sunday in September at 4:25 pm when Weatherspoon logged on to Twitter and he wrote, “You cancel your #Uknowurblackwhen plans when it’s raining.” The label was constantly expanding. Within two hours, 1.2% of all Twitter correspondence revolved around the Weatherspoon hashtag, everything black users did from car rims to tall T-shirts. The success it had afterwards was viral, and was a confirmation of a rich wireless fabric on the platform. Here, in all its melancholy brilliance, was Black Twitter.

More than a decade later, Black Twitter has become the most dynamic subset of Twitter, not just the largest social network on the Internet. It continues to be an incubator for almost every meme capable of creating, shaping and blending popular culture at lightning speed (Crying Jordan, This you?), Hashtag (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #OscarsSoWhite, #YouOKSis) and The Reason for Social Justice (Me Too), Black Lives Matter ) is worth knowing. The news and analysis, the calls and the answers, are the judges and the jury, along with a showcase of comedy, a therapy session and all the family cooking. Twitter Black is a multiverse that is both archival and forward-looking. As Weatherspoon puts it: “Our experience is universal. Our experience is great. Our experience is important. “

Although Twitter launched exactly 15 years ago with the goal of changing how and how quickly people communicate online, Black users ’invented use of the platform can somehow go back in time. In 1970, when the computer revolution was in its infancy, Amiri Baraka, the founder of the Black Arts Movement, published an essay called “Technology & Ethos”. “How do you communicate with big black people?” he asked. “What is our spirit, what will it project? What machines will it produce? What will they get? “

In the case of black users today, Twitter is Baraka’s prophetic machine: voice and community, power and empowerment. To use his words, “imagine – think – build – energize !!!” It has become a space.The following is the first official chronicle of how everything came together brilliantly.Like all history, it is incomplete.But it is a beginning.A scheme.Think of it as a kind of record of Black – how it moves and grows online, how it is created, how which becomes common – told from the eyes of those who lived.

Part I: Coming Together, 2008-2012

When the first web forums like BlackVoices, Melanet, and NetNoir were created in the mid-2000s, online spaces that satisfied black interests were scarce. BlackPlanet and MySpace have failed to fill the gap, and Facebook did not receive the essence of real-time communication. Users were looking for the next thing.

Kozza Babumba, Social Manager of Genius: Before 2007, we never had a conversation about almost anything. As a community, we didn’t all talk about what it was like when we sang the national anthem. Or what OJ Bronco was like when he was driving in that white. We just watched it on TV.