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Entity shares the scoop on black twitter.

Possibly one of the most misunderstood social media groups, black Twitter has been perceived as either a collective of black voices struggling to bring to light one of the biggest issues afflicting the community or another means for blacks and their struggle to be sources of entertainment.

As examples of the latter, there is a Reddit community for “screenshots of black people being hilarious on social media” and in a 2009 essay, The Awl co-founder Choire Sicha says, “at the risk of getting randomly harshed on by the Internet, I cannot keep quiet about my obsession with Late Night Black People Twitter, an obsession I know some of you other white people share, because it is awesome.”

But what most people don’t seem to understand about black Twitter is that it’s a safe space for a historically underserved community to connect with each other and even encourage a national dialogue between black communities and the mainstream media.

As defined by The Washington Post, “Black Twitter is part cultural force, cudgel, entertainment and refuge. It is its own society within Twitter, replete with inside jokes, slang and rules, centered on the interests of young blacks online — almost a quarter of all black Internet users are on Twitter.”

“When, in the past, would a politician have had a meeting with activists – not with political actors, not with leaders in a certain community, not with clergy – but with people who are actively agitating for reform, who are saying with their own mouths that black lives matter?” asks Meredith Clark, a professor at the University of North Texas who studies black online communities.

Popular hashtags “brought the activities of tech literate Blacks to the mainstream attention,” which conflicts with “popular conceptions” of black men and women in the digital world, says André Brock, a professor of information science at the University of Iowa.

In an article he wrote for Slate in 2010, technology columnist Farhad Manjoo wanted to examine how the black community gained such a large presence on Twitter. “They follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies — posts directed at other users,” he writes.

“I’ve heard from people who were very isolated, where they were one of very few black people in their communities,” Clark says. “For them, being able to log into Twitter, to talk to hundreds or thousands of people sharing the same background – that provided a great deal of relief.” And while recent events have incited racist backlash against black Twitter’s efforts, the resilience to promote a message of anti-racism and women’s empowerment (#blackwomendidthat) continues to prevail.

“It’s not that we don’t want to celebrate our visibility,” said Chatman, USC researcher. “Our visibility brings a certain amount of power. But we are wary that it can easily be co-opted, reconfigured in a certain way that we didn’t intend. There’s tension over the lack of control over our own narrative.”

The black community has several issues to bring to the table, from increasing awareness of police brutality to encouraging economic empowerment to the community. But the one most misunderstood fact about black Twitter is that nothing can be found there that isn’t reflected in our integrated society. As Clark recalls one prominent user telling her, “Black Twitter is just Twitter.”

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