There was a time when Black people used to brag about how many Twitter followers they had. First 1,000 was a lot, then you needed 10,000, then if you didn’t have 20,000 you were nobody.
This opened the door for the phenomenon called “Black Twitter” which got coverage in the media, and even a docuseries on Hulu. It’s arguable that Twitter became the strongest medium for communication and news consumption among Black folks of all social media platforms.
Then Elon Musk happened and he became a one-man echo chamber for anything ex-president Donald Trump says, no matter how ridiculous – or racist.
And now with Musk rallying with Trump, their alliance is tighter than ever, This begs the question, is it time for Black folks to get the hell away from the platform?
The billionaire founder of Tesla bought a $44 billion stake in October 2022, and reportedly is currently its largest shareholder. Not even 48 hours after the purchase, N-word use skyrocketed 500 percent on the platform.
Before long, as the face of what he rebranded “X,” this is what we began to get from Musk himself:
Finally, Musk reinstated Trump, who was booted in 2021, after running a poll allowing people to vote on his return:
This, despite Trump’s already long history of racist tweets, and the constant lying he later did.
Black folks were irate. In a commentary in The New Yorker, Columbia University professor Jelani Cobb said flatly, “Twitter…now subsidizes a billionaire who understands free speech to be synonymous with the right to abuse others.”
He wasn’t the first or last to make this declaration, and many went to Meta’s Threads, which is linked to the company’s Facebook and Instagram apps. As The Root noted last year, since Musk’s purchase, 30 million people have signed up for Threads.
In 2023, others also moved over to the new Spill app, created by Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, two former Twitter employees who targeted their platform specifically at Black people. About 200,000 people are users currently.
Right now, it’s hard to scroll through Twitter without seeing some ridiculous racist crud like Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets. So when you have alternatives like Spill, Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord, and others, you have to ask yourself why stay with Musk, Trump and X?
No shade to Black people who remain. They’re keeping their accounts for multiple reasons including work, their businesses, and connecting with friends. Trolls can be blocked and there are Community Notes that call out B.S. pretty frequently. But Musk is clearly a fan of Trump. Thus Project 2025, and a desire to militarize police would easily find a place on X for people who agree.
It’s unclear if Black Twitter can even survive, or if it will morph into another animal. But maybe it’s time for an evolution in this space for us anyway. In another year, we may have forgotten X and moved on to something else. If we do, it would do us good to make sure it’s not necessarily a “safe space” but a “smart space” for all of us.
Madison J. Gray is a New York-based journalist. He blogs at www.starkravingmadison.com.