Black Twitter
black social media movement
Black Twitter is an internet community largely consisting of black X (formerly Twitter) users in the United States and other nations, focused on issues of interest to the black community. Feminista Jones described it in Salon as "a collective of active, primarily African-American X users who have created a virtual community proving adept at bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes." A similar Black Twitter community arose in South Africa in the early 2010s.
User base
According to a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center, 28 percent of African Americans who had used the Internet also used Twitter, compared to 20 percent of online white, non-Hispanic Americans. By 2018, this gap had shrunk, with 26 percent of all African American adults using Twitter, compared to 24 percent of white adults and 20 percent of Hispanic adults. In addition, in 2013, 11 percent of African-American Twitter users said they used Twitter at least once a day, compared to 3 percent of white users. BlackTwitter.com was launched as a news aggregator reflective of black culture in 2020.
User and social media researcher André Brock 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 memes such as #YouKnowYoureBlackWhen and #YouKnowYoureFromQueens that were primarily aimed at Black Twitter users. Brock cites the first reference to a Black Twitter community—as "Late Night Black People Twitter" and "Black People Twitter"—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.
Kyra Gaunt, an early adopter who participated in Black Twitter, who also became a social media researcher, shared reactions to black users at the first 140 Characters Conference (#140Conf) that took place on November 17, 2009, at the O2 Indigo in London.
The public source identifies “Black Twitter” as black social media movement. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Black, Twitter and black.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Black Twitter”, the useful work is to connect “black social media movement” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16927700. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2018, 2020 and 2008.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Black Twitter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.