Why Black Twitter Isn’t Fleeing Elon Musk’s X

From Scandal to social justice, Black Twitter has dominated digital discourse, a phenomenon Prentice Penny explores in his new docuseries on Hulu, Black Twitter: A People’s History, based on Jason Parham’s 2021 feature for Wired. Penny and Parham, along with J Wortham of The New York Times Magazine, join host Brian Stelter to discuss Black Twitter’s cultural impact, and its future.

“Black Twitter gave the internet its own language in many ways,” says Parham. “It is in part the slang that we use online,” he adds. “This idea of, you know, shade and calling for receipts. But it’s also meme and GIF culture, the way we talk visually, the way we communicate digitally now.” Black Twitter has been the place for “everything,” says Wortham, from “up-to-the-minute commentary, cultural criticism, processing, working through the highs and lows of modern life with images and video culture. It’s sort of like a running soundtrack to trying to process the extreme amount of information that we’re all digesting all the time.”

Wortham likens Black Twitter’s presence on the social media platform to “being at a really glamorous party, and then all of a sudden realizing that the best conversations are happening in a room that you didn’t even know existed.” And Black Twitter hasn’t disappeared under Elon Musk’s ownership and rebranding of the platform as X, though Wortham acknowledges there has been “this sort of feeling of a white flight or migration away from Twitter.” Black people, she says, “are used to having their sacred spaces taken over and people buying them up and people encroaching—and we don’t leave.”

“Black people have to always find a way to work,” says Penny. “So if we left a place every time someone took it over that we disagreed with, we’d never be able to do anything or have anything or be a part of anything in this country.… We’re just kind of doing our own thing over here, in the way that you use the party as the reference point, whether or not he owns it or whoever owns it—it’s like, well, we’re just doing our thing anyway.”

“I think a lot of Black users are hesitant to let that go,” says Parham. “They don’t want to give up the space that they made the center of online conversation in the last decade.”

“We’re still showing up,” says Parham, noting that the recent Kendrick Lamar–Drake beef was “Black Twitter at its height. So, you know, we’re still there when we need to be.”