How Black Twitter affects how black college student identify themselves

Darius Foggy
Kurtis Alston
Christopher Petty
 Introduction

Twitter is a social network that helps people connect. Black twitter is a subset of twitter

that includes black millennials and other people of color who comment and post memes, pictures

and stories that go viral on twitter. Black twitter is a place “where young african americans can

get their news, trends and daily source of trends that are retweeted and spread all across the web

for all to see”(Florini).

Identity is how a person views themselves and they can physically act because of it

(hall.1996). Identity can be how a person dress or how they talk. It is what they mentally feel

makes them themselves. The community of black twitter is a place where they can get some of

that identity from.

This study aims to analyze how Twitter, and it’s community of black twitter has an affect

how black college students view themselves and how they carry themselves because of it.

Literature Review
 ‘Blacktags’ is known to be associated with Black Twitter users are mainly (African-

American).The Black Vernacular expression in the form of humor and Social Community.Even Choire

Sicha,whose an editor of the topical AWL website,Admitted to being fascinated with Late Night Black

People Twitter,an Obsession I know Some of You other White people share,because it is awesome:The

uniqueness of Black Twitter has raised concerns Critics and bloggers in relation to Blacktags mis-

reoresenting or self-Stereotyping the ‘Black Community’.The Head scratching concern of Blacktags has

turned it’s focused to the demographic distribution and supposed behaviour of (a sub-set)African-

American Users.Still some if wanted to know what counts a black twitter.

In 2009, the pew internet and American life project released a report showing that,of

those surveyed,26 percent of Black Americans use Twitter or another status update

service,compared with 19 percent of whites(Pew 2009).Black users are more involved in

“trending topics”. Bloggers and Journalists hasn’t gone blind to the activity of Black

Twitter.Florini said she uses the term “Black Twitter as a heuristic”.Users of color are often

invisible in academic (and popular) considerations of social media”. ”Black Twitter” is not real

in a monolithic sense.But what is real is millions of black users on twitter networking,Inaccuracy

with each other.

Various Hashtags directly indexed black cultural identifies,often because of their use of

slang cultural identifies,often because of their use of slang created and popularized by Black

American Youth.For example #BlackLivesMatter. Signifyin’ are mostly used for catch-all term

for various Black American oral traditions.Such as woofing,working,Playing the

dozens,Sounding,Louding talking,and others.A Key aspect of signifyin is that much of the

meaning resides outside of “lexical items and syntactic rules for their combination”.

(Mitchell-Kernan 1999,321)4On Black Twitter,Signifyin” often functions as a marker of

Black racial identity by indexing Black popular culture.One example is the popular hashtag game

in “Hip-Hop” circles signifyin’ on the R&B singer and rapper Drake.Hashtags such as #Drake-

Punchlines or #Fakedrake lyrics.A hashtag that addressed the share frustrations of many black

users with the narrow,monolithic way that “Blackness” is often understood as in opposition to all

things intellectual or technological.

Black twitter also affects how college students view their appearance. In a 2018 study it

was found that 66% of black women compare themselves to other women they see on twitter.

The same study found that the users who followed twitter accounts associated with the black

twitter community started to dress and emulate the styles they see from other users. (Simpson,

Dibari 2018).

As black twitter continues to grow and develop it continues to affect trends and how

people identify being black. Our goal for this study is to see how being a college student and

being apart of the black twitter community affects how students view themselves and their

identity.
Work Cited

Florini, S. (2014). Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’: Communication and Cultural

Performance on “Black Twitter,” 15(3).

Sharma, S. (2013). Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks And Contagion, vol.78, 46–69

DiBari, M., & Simpson, E. C. (2018). Image, Race, and Rhetoric: The Contention for Visual
Space on Twitter. The Journal of Social Media in Society, 7(1), 313-338.

Hall, S. (1996). Who needs identity. Questions of cultural identity, 16(2), 1-17.

Graham, R., & Smith, S. (2016). The content of our# characters: Black Twitter as counterpublic.
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2(4), 433-449.