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Tag: black twitter

  • Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be

    Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be

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    If you dwell in certain internet neighborhoods long enough, the rules of governing, however absurd or toxic, become second nature.

    On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, harassment, racism, and hate speech had become so uniquely poisonous under the ownership of Elon Musk, that if you identified as Black, a woman, queer, trans, or disabled you were all but guaranteed to have a target on your back. The combative environment engendered a grim sort of gallows humor. Even fans of the platform would refer to it as “the hellsite.” But people stayed, largely because there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative. Threads was weird. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time, Bluesky was too quiet—until something flipped, as the US election came and went, and people had had enough.

    Millions of users have decamped to Bluesky over the past couple of months. And while the platform isn’t perfect, many new arrivals are mystified by the platform’s disarmingly upbeat atmosphere. “Trying to find my niche subset of humor on here,” @lvteef posted on December 3, “because as of right now it’s very millennial happy go lucky on this app.”

    “I’m like where’s the misery? the sick jokes? the hateration in this dancery?” responded @knoxdotmp3.

    Clearly, some of us are struggling to shrug off the traumas of X. At the same time, longtime users of Bluesky also have questions about the future of the platform, and whether the environment they’ve created can withstand the influx of new people. It feels like social media is turning a page, and opening a new chapter. Only, this time, the architects of that not-so-faraway future are determined to get it right.

    One of those vanguards is Rudy Fraser, a 30-year-old New York technologist with a background in enterprise IT and community organizing. He’s the creator of Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service that is slowly turning into the main avenue for many Black users on Bluesky. If the phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. From the first flickers of internet exploration, Black people have searched for their own online oasis. It was true of NetNoir in 1996 and, more recently, of Black Twitter, the epicenter and engine of internet culture during the 2010s. And where those experiments failed—NetNoir fizzled out and Black Twitter, while still very active, lost any semblance of protection when Musk bought Twitter—Fraser wants to succeed. “Moderation,” he told me on a recent video call, “is a key piece of it.”

    Fraser has a knack for bringing people together. In addition to IT consulting, he’s worked as a lead organizer with We The People NYC, a grassroots mutual aid organization, since 2022, and also created Papertree, a digital mutual aid tool that allows large groups of people to share money. “I wanted to set up a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t pan out, Fraser reassessed.

    It was the spring of 2023, not long after Bluesky invites started going out, and Fraser snagged one during its beta testing (he was user 51,921). He was already involved in some Web3-adjacent projects, and interested in questions around data ownership. Bluesky’s mission—to be a decentralized social media platform, and truly make the social internet a self-governing ecosystem—appealed to him for similar reasons. “The whole idea of AT protocol and the promise of an algorithmic custom feed seemed like a cool thing to jump into,” he said.

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  • The Anderson Cooper of Black Twitter Believes Journalism Can Survive Influencers

    The Anderson Cooper of Black Twitter Believes Journalism Can Survive Influencers

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    —at BuzzFeed. I bet they regret rejecting you now [laughs].

    It’s funny because people will tell me, “Hey, we shared your tweet in our newsroom Slack channel. That’s how we found out about the story and now we’re going to write about it.” So you don’t have to have millions of followers, but I have a reach that’s a little different. And that’s important to me.

    It should be.

    That’s not to say I always get everything right. I always tell people, journalists get things wrong. We issue corrections. We try our best to do what we can. But what’s most important to me is making sure that the stories that I think people need to know about or need to read about, I try to get them out there—and apparently my Twitter page is the best way to do it.

    There is a reason people call you the Anderson Cooper of Black Twitter.

    There are too many nicknames. There was a Twitter thread with a bunch of different nicknames. It’s humbling. It’s nice to see that people care about what you’re doing. But it also reminds me of how important it is—especially for our community, the Black community—to get these stories out and to make sure our stories are told and represented, and that people know about them.

    And not just get them out, but get them out correctly.

    Exactly.

    This week the Pew Research Center released a study stating that many Black Americans are distrustful of US institutions because they believe they are being conspired against. The same is true of news media. But a lot of people online trust you as a news source, which feels increasingly rare these days.

    And you know what, they’re not wrong [laughs]. I’ve been reading about media reparations. In the 1960s, the Kansas City Star totally ignored what was going on with the Civil Rights Movement and other things that were happening in the Black community. So they relied on Black newsrooms, the Kansas City Sun being one of them, to get them the news that they cared about.

    Obviously when we’re talking about news deserts, Black communities are completely parched. What’s the quote? When white America gets a cold, Black Americans get the flu. That’s doubly true for Black media and Black newsrooms. Whenever I look at layoff numbers, these giant losses that have happened in traditional and local media, Black newsrooms are disappearing at greater rates to their white counterparts.

    Sometimes I feel like the state of the industry is like trying to solve a riddle that can’t be solved, or doesn’t want to be solved—because, let’s be real, that’s a different discussion in itself. How can Black people better trust the news when we aren’t being staffed, or saved from layoffs, in newsrooms?

    Right.

    It creates a fractured news economy where instead of going to MSNBC or The Washington Post for information, people start to source their news from social media accounts that don’t always paint the full picture or even an accurate one.

    It is getting harder and harder. But I do know a lot of people who rely on accounts like The Shade Room or The Spiritual World for news.

    A friend recently sent me a news clip from TSW and I had never heard of it.

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  • Why the Voices of Black Twitter Were Worth Saving

    Why the Voices of Black Twitter Were Worth Saving

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    The fear was reasonable. It was a fear I also carried. Uncertainty about whether or not I should tell the story now, and whether or not it was right to air 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, power, and what I felt was its unquestionable cultural impact—I was, admittedly, attempting to define a community that defies easy definition. In truth, Black Twitter is more than a community. It is an ever-growing, always-evolving force that has influenced nearly every aspect of modern life.

    Black Twitter is the birthplace of all your favorite memes, hashtags, and trends. It is more than that, too: Black Twitter doesn’t simply make culture, it shapes society. From the history-setting presidency of Barack Obama to hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite, #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackLivesMatter, Black Twitter is both the extraordinary and the everyday. It is, as I wrote in 2021, all the things: news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one.

    Even as other platforms like TikTok have attempted to capture what made Twitter what it is—in my estimation, the most significant social platform of the 2010s—Black Twitter endures as the most dynamic subset not only of Twitter, now X, but of the wider social internet (as last week proved, there was no better place to be than Black Twitter as the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef played out).

    What’s more, so much of Black life in public view is misrepresented and appropriated. It’s twisted into fantasy, festish or worse—left for dead. The technologies available to us have magnified our connection just as they have quickened our erasure. Our stories are routinely stolen from us, if not deleted outright. Out of our hands, our history is flattened and repurposed into dangerous falsehoods by lawmakers who peddle misinformation for personal gain. The story of Black Twitter was one 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 impermanence. Once-crucial digital gathering spots from the 1990s and 2000s—NetNoir, Black Voices, MelaNet, Black Planet and others—had come and gone largely without proper contextualizing. So it was important that I give Black Twitter its flowers while it was still around, which now seems even more urgent under the ownership of Elon Musk. All that we built, and continue to build on the platform, could be gone tomorrow.

    After WIRED published the people’s history of Black Twitter, I began working on a documentary based on the reporting in the oral history. The resulting three-part series, out today, expands on the original story, and also captures the very real fears surrounding what could lay in Black Twitter’s future.

    So why this story, and why now? It’s simple, really. I didn’t want Black Twitter to be another footnote.

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  • A Peek Inside Hulu's New 'Black Twitter' Docuseries

    A Peek Inside Hulu's New 'Black Twitter' Docuseries

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    This week, the writer, director, and executive producers of the new documentary series Black Twitter: A People’s History tell us how they brought the community’s vibrancy to the small screen.

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