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Black Twitter?: Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion
Abstract
This essay foregrounds how technocultural assemblages - software platforms, algorithms, digital networks and affects - are constitutive of online racialized identities. Rather than being concerned with what online identities are in terms of ethno-racial representation and signification, we can explore how they are materialized via the technologies of online platforms. The essay focuses on the micro-blogging site of Twitter and the viral phenomenon of racialized hashtags - dubbed as 'Blacktags' - for example #onlyintheghetto or #ifsantawasblack. The circulation of these racialized hashtags is analyzed as the transmission of contagious meanings and affects, such as anti/racist humour, sentiment and social commentary. Blacktags as contagious digital objects play a role in constituting the 'Black Twitter' identities they articulate and interact with. Beyond conceiving Black Twitter as a group of preconstituted users tweeting racialized hashtags, Blacktags are instrumental in producing networked subjects which have the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online. Thus, ethno-racial collective behaviours on the Twitter social media platform are grasped as emergent aggregations, materialized through the contagious social relations produced by the networked propagation of Blacktags.
... The concept of Black Twitter, a networked cultural identity that originated in the United States, underscores how race can shape the use and role of social media. Black Twitter demonstrates how African American users leverage the platform to articulate shared experiences, advocate for social justice, and construct a distinct digital identity (Sharma, 2013). Similarly, in South Africa, race and socio-economic factors shape the ways in which individuals and communities use social media, reflecting broader societal inequalities (Mpofu, 2019). ...
Digital governance presents a transformative opportunity for enhancing citizen engagement and improving public service delivery, particularly in South Africa's urban contexts characterized by complex socio-economic challenges. This study analyzes the official city X (formerly Twitter) accounts of Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Tshwane, examining their role in promoting participatory governance. Drawing on 8441 tweets through sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and thematic analysis, the research evaluates engagement trends, content strategies, and city-specific governance priorities. The findings reveal notable disparities in approaches and outcomes across the three cities. Cape Town demonstrates a consistent focus on national challenges, policy communication, and citizen outreach, yet struggles with low engagement levels, potentially due to a lack of dynamic messaging. Johannesburg's approach, centered on utility-specific updates and branding, shows higher engagement but relies heavily on reactive strategies, with negative sentiments driving the most interaction. Tshwane emphasizes technical service delivery, such as escalations and outage management, reflecting a reactive and operational focus. These differences illustrate how varying strategies impact public engagement, providing valuable insights into the alignment, or misalignment, of local digital practices with broader governance objectives. Importantly, these findings offer lessons for the South African government as it seeks to implement the Digital Government Policy Framework (DGPF). By identifying effective practices and their outcomes, the government can develop evidence-based strategies to enhance transparency, inclusivity, and citizen engagement. The study underscores the importance of leveraging diverse municipal experiences to bridge gaps in digital priorities and address the persistent digital divide, contributing to the advancement of participatory governance and urban resilience in the Global South.
... From the beginning, social media systems played a critical role in the rise and popularization of BLM [13]. Twitter has generated a great deal of activity as a place where content and issues specific to the African American community have gained attention [40]. Following the deaths of Martin, Brown, and others, the dissemination of images, videos, and hashtags on Twitter and other social media served a pivotal role leading to the emergence of BLM [10,19]. ...
Social movements use social computing systems to complement offline mobilizations, but prior literature has focused almost exclusively on movement actors' use of social media. In this paper, we analyze participation and attention to topics connected with the Black Lives Matter movement in the English language version of Wikipedia between 2014 and 2016. Our results point to the use of Wikipedia to (1) intensively document and connect historical and contemporary events, (2) collaboratively migrate activity to support coverage of new events, and (3) dynamically re-appraise pre-existing knowledge in the aftermath of new events. These findings reveal patterns of behavior that complement theories of collective memory and collective action and help explain how social computing systems can encode and retrieve knowledge about social movements as they unfold.
Historically, transgender people of color (TPOC) have been silenced in white trans spaces for not fitting into transnormativity - the typical white, binary, skinny, and privileged image of trans people, and for raising concerns related to race, culture, and ethnicity. Social media and online communities serve as supportive spaces for transgender (shortened to trans) individuals; however, trans people of color require even more support combating systematic oppression, managing increased levels of discrimination, and navigating their cultural backgrounds. In order to understand how TPOC use social media, we explore the experiences of TPOC on Reddit. We used the Reddit API to obtain Reddit posts from four prominent transgender subreddits (r/ftm, r/mtf, r/trans, and r/Non-Binary) which included the phrase "people of color" or the abbreviation "POC", resulting in a total of 145 posts and 2867 comments. Thematic analysis was then used to identify three themes of discussion - alienation, support, and existing in physical spaces, which informed our design considerations. Experiences shared in the Reddit posts indicated that TPOC feel overshadowed by white trans individuals in online communities and desire to build connections with other TPOC both online and in person. We propose design recommendations for both Reddit as a platform and subreddit moderators that regulate online trans communities to encourage growing networks among TPOC, improve communication among users and moderators, and design spaces that center POC voices within subreddits, all of which provide a much more supportive online environment for TPOC.
Few studies characterize the diffusion of racist content on fringe social media platforms. We demonstrate how racism spread on Parler, a far right, un(der)-moderated social media platform, and that a single comment to a racist post increases the likelihood a person will generate and propagate new racist content. We found that racism on Parler was a social “contagion.” Using 50,375 posts from 2018 to 2021 that contained racist remarks, we quantified the spread of racism from the posts-to-comments (micro) and user-to-user (macro) levels. Comments on racist posts were 21 times more likely to be racist than comments on non-racist posts. On an average, Parler users posted 166% more racist content after an engagement with a racist post. At the posts-to-comments level, the spread of racist sentiment is alarming within ethnic subgroups (e.g. anti-Jewish-specific comments were 191 times more likely to appear on “anti-Jewish” posts; anti-Black-specific comments were 227 times more likely to appear on “anti-Black” posts). The spread of racist rhetoric between subgroups is also significant, albeit lower than within subgroups, suggesting a spillover effect. Aggregate user posting patterns also suggest that the spread of racist rhetoric between subgroups is lower, but significant. Our findings therefore suggest interventions should target users actively engaging with racist content. Furthermore, our study provides evidence that Parler served as a gateway platform that radicalized users toward racist content production, underscoring the urgency of intervention. Given the drawbacks of traditional moderation strategies, we propose additional interventions, policies, and structural changes for social media platforms to mitigate racism online.
Since the global virality of the ‘Renegade’ dance on TikTok and beyond in 2020, concerns regarding the erasure of Black girls have been noted. This paper extends the conversation by considering how Black girls and teenagers may continue to wrestle with visibility and suppression even within a more intimate in-group community of Black TikTokers. In this paper, we assemble an original corpus of TikTok posts purposively sampled from #BlackGirlTikTok and apply content analysis guided by critical technocultural discourse analysis. Our findings reveal that the dominant discourse on #BlackGirlTikTok focused on embodied self-care (i.e. body and beauty care, health and wellness) and Black popular culture (i.e. audio memes, parlance), constituting a niche community for users to commune. However, despite the nomenclature of the hashtag, the users dominating the community were overtly Black women rather than Black girls or teenagers, thus raising issues of visibility, competition, and suppression within the in-group community.
There has been a dramatic surge in uses of big data analytics and automated methods to detect and remove hate speech from social media, with these methods deployed both by platforms themselves and within academic research. At the same time, recent social scientific scholarship has accused social media data analytics of decontextualizing complex sociological issues and reducing them to linguistic problems that can be straightforwardly mapped and removed. Intervening in these debates, this article draws on findings from two interdisciplinary projects, spanning five years in total, which generated comparative datasets from Twitter (X). Focusing on three issues that we identified and negotiated in our own analysis – which we characterize as problems of context, classification and reproducibility – we build on existing critiques of automated methods, while also charting methodological pathways forward. Informed by theoretical debates in feminist science studies and STS, we set out a diffractive approach to engaging with large datasets from social media, which centralizes tensions rather than correlations between computational, quantitative and qualitative data.
This chapter is entitled “Communicative Human Rights and Colonial Digital Capitalism”. Generally recognised in feminist culture and communication critical studies is the innovative contribution of the political scientist Jodi Dean. It is notable that the culture and communication feminism of this author, in their pioneering formulation of “communicative capitalism”, deprioritises and renders as largely irrespective the advertising medium of the communicative message. Such that the circulation of communication digitally and the circulation of messages through analogue channels are considered and treated as interchangeable features of communicative capitalism. Dean recognises that messages, in communicative capitalism, “are contributions to circulating content – not actions to elicit responses” (ibid.: 58). Discounting the medium of the message within dot.com media communication is a consistent feature of Dean’s Communicative Capitalism. The unmitigated parturition of the message from its medium is disputed and in so doing bringing into question the assertion that “uncoupled from contexts of action and application – as on the Web or in print and broadcast media – the message is simply part of a circulating data stream” (ibid.). It is my contention that Dean’s work has some anticolonial feminist application in terms of a challenge to the colonising features of digital communication. This chapter develops the notion of communicative capitalism. It accomplishes this through the use of anticolonial feminist frames, so as to explore the extent to which the inflation and excessive supply of tickets for the case studied 15th December 2022 Asake concert at the O2 Academy Brixton was attributable to covetous and avaricious capitalistic promotional advertising exploitation of a largely Black female populated community of #BlackTwitter social media users.
A discussion of the works of Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze reveals some common insights into a social epistemology that rejects both methodological individualism and methodological holism. In this respect, the debate on crowds in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is particularly interesting because it is the historical context within which the individualist and holist epistemologies took shape. Arguably, that debate is still rich and inspiring today insofar as it can be said to open the problem field of the relationship between the individual and the group in social thought and sociological theory. Despite several differences, Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze converge on a concept that can be termed 'multiplicity'. It includes phenomena like crowds and packs (or 'sects', in Tarde's terminology) that are properly speaking neither subjects nor objects. The concept provides a prism that also has relevant consequences for an understanding of the processes of imitation and leadership.
This article challenges the negative image that, since the late 19th century, has been associated with crowds, and it does so by focusing on a number of bodily-anatomic aspects of crowd behavior. I first demonstrate that the work of one of the leading crowd psychologists, Gustave Le Bon, instigated a racist body politics. As a contrast to Le Bon's political program, I examine Walt Whitman's poetry and argue that the crowd may embody a democratic vision that emphasizes the social and political import of sexuality and body-to-body contact. Further, I dispute classical crowd theory's idea of an antagonistic relationship between crowds and individuality. Following Elias Canetti, I claim instead that the bodily compression of crowds in fact liberates individuals and creates a democratic transformation. The analysis results in a rehabilitation of crowds and briefly suggests how a reinterpretation of crowd behavior may inform current debates in social theory.
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