Black Twitter

Black Twitter is a cultural identity on the Twitter social network focused on issues of interest to the black community, particularly in the United States.Feminista Jones described it in Salon as "a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community ... [and are] proving adept at bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes." Similar Black Twitter communities are growing in South Africa and Great Britain. Although Black Twitter has a strong black American user base, other people and groups are able to be a part of this social media circle through commonalities in shared experiences and reactions to such online.

According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, 28 percent of African Americans who use the Internet use Twitter, compared to 20 percent of online white, non-Hispanic Americans. In addition, 11 percent of African-American Twitter users say they use Twitter at least once a day, compared to 3 percent of white users.

André Brock of the University of Iowa dates the first published comments on black Twitter usage to a 2008 piece by blogger Anil Dash, and a 2009 article by Chris Wilson in The Root describing the viral success of Twitter joke memes such as #YouKnowYoureBlackWhen and #YouKnowYoureFromQueens that were primarily aimed at black Twitter users. Brock says the first reference to a Black Twitter community—as "Late Night Black People Twitter" and "Black People Twitter"—occurred in the November 2009 article "What Were Black People Talking About on Twitter Last Night?" by Choire Sicha, co-founder of current-affairs website The Awl. Sicha described it as "huge, organic and ... seemingly seriously nocturnal"—in fact, active around the clock. Blacktwitter.com was released independently in the fall of 2015 to reflect the humorous side of blacktwitter in images.

An August 2010 article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate, "How Black People Use Twitter," brought the community to wider attention. Manjoo wrote that young black people appeared to use Twitter in a particular way: "They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users." Manjoo cited Brendan Meeder of Carnegie Mellon University, who argued that the high level of reciprocity between the hundreds of users who initiate hashtags (or "blacktags") leads to a high-density, influential network.

...
Wikipedia