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Hashtagging was a method, “Black Twitter” argues, that Black customers formed Twitter’s vernacular. Another was by memes, which allowed a layered visible vocabulary for temper, irony, emotion and angle. Black folks, the documentary argues, had been pioneers of memes-as-language and sometimes the faces of it: Michael Jackson munching popcorn (to convey excited spectatorship), James Harden eye-rolling away from an interviewer (wry dismissal), Donald Glover strolling right into a burning room (stunned horror) and naturally, the Pietà of memes, Crying Jordan.
Like any social platform, Twitter is folks; its historical past is human historical past. So “Black Twitter” doubles as a social historical past of America from the start of the Obama period to the aftermath (and resumption?) of the Trump period, an arc of hope to disillusionment to acrimony. It begins nostalgically, with the election of the primary Black president (who was additionally an early Twitter adopter) and reminiscences of over-the-top on-line beefs and “Scandal” watch events.
With the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, Black Twitter served as a crowdsourced info community and protest discussion board. The hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown invited Black customers to submit pairs of photographs of themselves, grimly satirizing the tendency of media retailers to decide on essentially the most menacing photos of Black folks shot by the police.
The remainder of “Black Twitter” is (current) historical past: the component of racial backlash round Donald J. Trump’s election; Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests; the pandemic; BBQ Becky and Permit Patty and the Jan. 6 attackers on the Capitol. Eventually, Elon Musk buys the platform, reinstates banned accounts and presides over a poisonous spill of hate speech. (Most just lately Musk restored the account of the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.)
Seen hopefully, the story of “Black Twitter” is that of the irrepressibility of a tradition’s expression. Seen extra gloomily, it’s a reminder of the tremendous line between a public discussion board offering a voice for the much less highly effective and its getting used as a cudgel towards them.
If there’s an optimistic takeaway from this quick, impressionistic historical past, it’s that Black Twitter can be a phenomenon that preceded Twitter — as seen in Black customers’ earlier embrace of retailers like Myspace — and that it’s going to persist elsewhere if it involves that. (Already, the documentary says, its vitality is in some methods shifting to video platforms like TikTok.)
“Black Twitter: A People’s History” doesn’t have grand predictions about what comes subsequent. But it’s an engagingly particular snapshot of the Twitter period and the social interval it overlapped with: a time that was severe even when it was foolish, that was enjoyable till it wasn’t.
