Black Twitter Documents Social Media History with Vervor and Comedy

Twitter (now called ‘X’) has always been a online playground filled with barbs, insults and comical takes on celebrity coupled with everyday people and everyday life.  But, baby when Black folks hit the platform it changed the landscape forever.

Based on Jason Parham’s  ‘A Peoples’s History of Black Twitter, Hulu and Onyx Collective’s docu-series goes deep into how Black culture not only made Twitter the popular place to post, but shifted how masses look for news, how politicians navigated the platform for votes and even served as the inspiration for an award winning film based on shenanigans posted in the middle of the night during a road trip.

Gorgeously shot with a mix of experts from a plethroa of backgrounds, genders and professional lanes the question is poised in Episode One – How would you describe Black Twitter in one word?  Is it the cookout? The Soul Train or is it just us and how we just show up being authentically ourselves?

Spread out in three episodes, Parham, Executive Producer Prentice Penny (“Insecure”) and director Joie Jacoby explore the history of the platform from its inception and how it’s evaluation soared to over $250 million after Barack Obama was elected.  We learn of how the platform was a monetization cow when ad agencies began securing bloggers and influencers to host watch parties for shows like “Scandal” boosting their ratings, popularity and making it’s mostly unknown cast and showrunner infamous forever.

Black Twitter began using memes as form of expression.  After all, pictures sometimes speak a thousand words.  Most importantly, during a turning point in American history with Black Lives Matter, we witnessed Black Twitter shift from being a place about jokes, memes and gifs to a platform utilized in democratizing and politicizing Black issues.  Now, Black people didn’t have to rely on news outlets to tell our stories with a slight schism, but acquired the power to share without a filter via social media.

Yet, just a Black America and Black Twitter gain influence, Donald Trump become POTUS and Elon Musk acquires the platform.  White people have never been used to sharing space with Black voices and Black Twitter made them resentful.  So, through Musk’s acquisition of the platform – a change in the culture occurred.  After all, by attempting to erase Black history – you are essentially trying to erase ‘us.’

Yet, you can’t keep us down because most of Black Twitter ran off the platform and shifted their focus to and Instagram with D-nice, Club Quarantine and the Versus Battles.

Richard Spikes may not get credit for inventing the gear shift that is used to operate millions of cars daily. To name just a few, Africans and Black people have invented the paper bag, vending machines, telephone transmitters for long distance phone calls, the ironing board, traffic lights, safety helmets, Ajax, the mop, gas masks, air conditioning, aspirin, the bicycle, the fountain pen and 1001 items that we use in everyday life in which its inventors have never been properly credited or acknowledged.

With Black Twitter, Jason Parham is insuring that this is one time our contributions are not acknowledged, but put in writing and on celluloid for posterity for generations to come.