Black Twitter, in many instances, is ‘pushing for answers and asking for accountability’

On Feb. 10, WBUR’s “Here and Now” featured Meredith Clark on “The Buzz Over Black Twitter.” Clark is a newspaper editor and Ph.D. candidate at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and she’s writing her dissertation on Black Twitter.

As so many people have said, this isn’t a new phenomenon. We can go back to the first black newspaper and see that the messages that were of concern to black people were being talked about there because they weren’t being talked about in the mainstream press. In terms of the Internet, we’re seeing the same phenomenon unfold. But you don’t necessarily have to be black to participate, and it’s certainly in no way limited to only black people and topics of, quote-unquote, “black interest.”