‘Black Twitter’ was best described by Donovan X. Ramsey in his article for the Atlantic as, “a large network of black Twitter users and their loosely coordinated interactions, many of which accumulate into trending topics due to the network’s size, inter-connectedness, and unique activity.”

Black Twitter focuses primarily on issues of interest to the (global) black community, a marginalized community that repeatedly suffers from either a lack of representation or misrepresentation in mainstream media.

Black Twitter’s first ground-breaking activity focused USA & global attention to the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The most impactful was Black Twitter’s unrelenting activity highlighting mainstream media’s lack of coverage around state violence in marginalized communities which is how hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was born.

When it comes to political and cultural commentary, much of what can be seen in Black Twitter is strong micro-Journalism or micro-blogging. The spirit behind it is one of solidarity, “if the mainstream media won’t represent us or if they continue to address black issues in manners that are laced with prejudice and racism, then we will take matters into our own hands by representing and educating ourselves”. -Shades of Noir

Black Twitter has been particularly successful in coming together to challenge the mainstream media for its lack of diversity and representation in order to push for visible change, particularly using a form of social media activism often described as a “call-out culture” and defined as “the act of drawing attention to problematic behavior” for the sake of accountability.

Read the original article on Shades of Noir