Valuing Black Twitter over Black employees
When I first created a Twitter profile in 2009, the conversations I had with Black friends on the platform were little more than playful hot takes about popular hiphop music and the fallout of the 2008 recession. The site was new and easy to use, so for young Black kids with plenty of opinions 11 years ago, Twitter was a digital playground.
As more people around the world joined Twitter, the Black youths of America quietly created their own online community within the platform. This was a slice of internet where Black kids spoke candidly with each other about Black issues. It quickly became known as Black Twitter.
The subculture’s influence on the country is tangible. Black Lives Matter came to prominence through Black Twitter. Black Twitter caught the world’s attention with hashtags like #LoveWins, in regard to marriage equality, as well as phrases like Black Girl Magic, which celebrates Black women, and the viral video sensation that was the mannequin challenge.
The group also popularized “Karen” as a moniker for racist white women. And when San Francisco supervisors recently introduced the CAREN Act, which would designate discriminatory calls to the police as hate crimes, it was essentially a nod to Black Twitter.
Suffice it to say, Black people helped make Twitter cool for more than a decade. And the site still needs brown fingers tweeting into the ether to remain relevant. So, is it safe to assume the company, which is headquartered in San Francisco, hires, retains and promotes Black people in a way that reflects their importance online as users? No, it is not. Black people make up about 13% of the country’s population, based on recent U.S. census data, but we account for about 24% of overall Twitter users, according to the Pew Research Center. According to 2020 data, only 6% of Twitter’s workforce in the U.S. is Black. In 2017, the number was closer to 3%.
When it comes to leadership positions, Black people held fewer than 5% of those jobs at Twitter. They also only accounted for 3% of promotions.
Attrition data from Twitter doesn’t often bode well for the company either: From October 2018 to October 2019, Black people made up 9% of the new hires. But in that same window, they also accounted for 9% of the company’s attrition, the employees who left their jobs at Twitter.
Maybe Twitter is just late to the party. Black Twitter didn’t reveal its growing power until the release of “Kony 2012,” a short documentary about the Ugandan war criminal and militia leader Joseph Kony. Black Twitter accounts were some of the first to give nuanced takes on the project, including how it contained flawed reporting on Africa’s robust political and social turmoil at the time.
While the project was celebrated at film festivals, its stint in the national spotlight was cut short by Black Twitter. A few months later, Black Twitter users turned their attention to the upcoming presidential election and led conversations regarding the potential second term of America’s first Black commander in chief.
Black Twitter galvanized into a cultural watchdog in the U.S. over the next few years, which journalist Andre Wheeler elegantly chronicled in a 2019 piece for the Guardian. More often than not, our doggedness pertained to protecting black identity in pop culture, which meant Black Twitter often discussed cultural appropriation. There was ample ammunition for this dialogue considering how often our country has pilfered Black culture for financial benefit.
Some could say this is where cancel culture was born. I don’t think of it that way. What Black Twitter created through its vocal moments of opposition were avenues for other marginalized groups to band together to do the same. For example, calls for people to boycott Goya Foods, whose products are a staple in many Latino households, are being bolstered on Black Twitter after the company’s CEO recently praised President Trump.
So, while people across the country call for race reform in a litany of areas, maybe we should look closer at the place where conversations become global movements. Black Twitter is a vibrant swath of Twitter that makes the app relevant. Now is the chance for the company to return the love Black people have given it for more than a decade.
Black Twitter has shown it’s capable of changing the world with a hashtag. The least the company can do is hire and promote more Black employees.