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2009·Early YouTube

Black Twitter

The community that set the agenda of a platform it did not own, and wrote most of the language everybody else copied.

You might remember it as Late Night Black People Twitter

A trend people joined in with

The story

What this was

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.

It first appeared in 2009, during early YouTube.

An enormous proportion of what the whole internet says came from here first, and the pattern by which it travels — coined on Black Twitter, adopted by everybody, monetised by brands, credited to nobody — is the single most consistent economic fact about online culture. It has also functioned repeatedly as an accountability mechanism, moving stories that mainstream outlets had ignored into national coverage within hours.

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.

You were there

More from 2009

The same internet

Early YouTube

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
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.
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