Black Twitter
You might remember it as Late Night Black People Twitter
This spread through many posts rather than one canonical upload.
2009·Early YouTube·informative
The community that set the agenda of a platform it did not own, and wrote most of the language everybody else copied.
At a glanceThe facts
- Spread in
- 2009
- Format
- Phenomenon
- Where it started
- Also known as
- A community made up mostly of Black users of the platform, in the United States and elsewhere
- Origin
- No single original
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
Not an account or a place — a network of largely Black American users whose conversation, running in real time and disproportionately at night, repeatedly took over Twitter's trending topics. Early hashtags like #YouKnowYoureBlackWhen and #ThatsAfrican were being written about by 2008 and 2009, and observers noticed something they had no vocabulary for: a community that was clearly organised and had never been organised by anybody.
Black Twitter is now studied academically, has parallel communities in South Africa and elsewhere, and has been the subject of documentaries. Its fragmentation after Twitter's 2022 sale is one of the genuine cultural losses of that period: the thing depended on everybody being in one place, and there is no longer one place.
Why it matteredWhat changed
A community with no membership and no site of its own, whose hashtags include #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #OscarsSoWhite.
TimelineIn order
- Found
An article by Choire Sicha in The Awl makes what a scholar later cites as the first reference to the term.1
- Made
The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter is created.1
- Later
A book deal for a juror in the George Zimmerman trial is abandoned after pressure on Twitter.1
- Took off
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown begins. Time names it the most influential hashtag of the year.1
- Made
#OscarsSoWhite begins.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asIt means every Black person on Twitter.
ActuallyIn the words of one writer in 2013, not everyone in Black Twitter is Black, and not every Black person on Twitter is in it.1
Commonly remembered asIt is a separate site.
ActuallyIt is a community of users on the one site.1
LegacyWhat it left behind
- In 2013 the Pew Research Center found that 28 per cent of African Americans who were online used Twitter, against 20 per cent of white Americans.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
Where it came fromWhat we know
This spread through many posts rather than one identifiable original. The example shown is one surviving copy and is not claimed as the first.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this. It spread through many posts rather than from one identifiable original.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things