If you want to know at any given moment what a portion of Black America is concerned with or talking about, plug into the rapidly exploding social media phenomenon referred to as Black Twitter.
Pointed hashtags such as #JusticeforTrayvon, #Blacklivesmatter, #Sandrabland, about the death of a young Black woman while in police custody in a small Texas town, and most recently #SamuelDubose, who died at the hands of a Cincinnati police officer, have become the shocking jumping-off points for sharing of information, stimulating conversation and mobilizing groups to initiate corporeal protests.
As folks now say: it’s a thing.
“Black Twitter was instrumental in marshaling people and energy around issues like police shootings of unarmed African-Americans in Ferguson and beyond,” says Karen Grigsby Bates, a veteran journalist and the Los Angeles-based correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). “It brought attention to aggressive policing before op-ed writers started to weigh in on the cause.”
A few years ago, it may have been easy to dismiss Black Twitter as a digital echo chamber, whose adherents had no interest in what the rest of America were talking about and couldn’t care less about crossing over. But for many, who for years lamented the lack of a vibrant civil rights movement, here is a rolling, amorphous, but decisively effective movement built on the serpentine back of social media.
What social media did for the Arab Spring, it’s now doing for a litany of issues that have always been percolating just beneath the American consciousness but have been top of mind for African-Americans.
“#Ferguson was the most used hashtag last year, and that was not just Black Twitter, but Twitter overall,” says Cheryl Contee, CEO and co-founder of Fission Strategy, a company that builds social media campaigns for social causes. “There are people who are seeking me out to have dialogue, and I’m open to that dialogue, and I will never meet those people.”
