Of course, that loss would be immeasurable. “Black Twitter has reflected the fuller range of Blacks and their denial of respect,” said Sarah J. Jackson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the book. #Hashtag Activism. “It modeled what a healthy public realm could look like, from incoming calls and captions to community debates about identity, from uncomfortable parts to uncomfortable ones. the part that inspires you.”
Denver Sean is the editor of the gossip site Love B. Scott. He joined Twitter in 2009 just as Black Twitter was crystallizing and felt it was the first platform to give Black people a voice. “There is no one to guard the gate or silence Black opinions,” he said. “It’s just a chronological feed of Black’s thoughts. That’s great – most of the time.”
So if the time comes and Black Twitter has to shut down, can it be replicated on another social media platform?
“Probably not,” Brock said. “Mastodon is silage. Discord is voice-centric. TikTok is too busy. Nothing else closely replicates Twitter’s feature set.” He said that Instagram is the most obvious candidate because it “has seen a slow migration of Black Twitter over the past 5 years. It’s not satisfactory, but it has the core Black Instagram experience for now.”
I should note that Twitter’s very real end is part of the social network’s lifecycle. Digital reservoirs die and new ones are built after them. This has been true as long as Black users have been online, from the rise and fall of Melanet in the late 1990s to BlackPlanet and MySpace. Social migration is a constant.
A further option that popped up in the conversation between members of Black Twitter, albeit fleeting, was Somewhere good, an audio platform that competes with Clubhouse but is geared towards inclusive communities only. Unlike Twitter, however, it relies solely on voice notes, touting itself as “an app that doesn’t look like a feed but more like a kickback.”
Whatever the destination, Black Twitter will be increasingly difficult to replicate. “The infrastructure of places like Mastodon and TikTok, are so different from each other, of course, too segmented to give the feel of a real public square,” Jackson said. “They require a learning curve that many would object to, algorithmically designed to be content narrow and transient. I hope more people will depend more on Instagram, but it will never be the same.”
Then what would happen to the social network without its public square? Sean says that change has happened, citing that it has lost the appeal of the days before when things were more organic and users weren’t trying to create virality. Today’s Black Twitter isn’t even the Black Twitter of a few years ago, he said. “Anything that happens on any new platform will reflect that — but not Black Twitter.”
