The influential online community that gave rise to social movements like #BlackLivesMatter is now a "digital diaspora” in search of a new home.
The influential online community that gave rise to social movements like #BlackLivesMatter is now a "digital diaspora” in search of a new home.
Yeah, it’s very sad.
The core of the issue is that it’s too easy for us privileged folks to suggest things like - and I’m not trying to pick on you at all here - that vulnerable people stay in any sort of “self-enforced walled garden” rather than robust moderation tools and the human resources to use them to their full potential.
Voluntary separation is better than enforced separation, but yes, I get where you’re coming from.
The thing is, the entire reason - I assume - that there is a search for a new place to tweet / microblog is that there has been some intrusion or destabilisation of previous - perhaps unwitting - voluntary separation(s).
Whether this pseudo-volunteering was black communities keeping to certain, um, “places”(?; there has to be a better word; subjects? hashtags? keywords?) for community content, like-minded safe spaces and chat or whether it was merely other people respectfully (or otherwise) staying out of those places, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe a little of both?
Something was definitely going on for Black Twitter to have been the phenomenon it was after all.