Meredith Clark: One of the notions we have about journalism is that journalism is the first draft of history. But I’ve always said that journalism is the first draft of historical fiction, because there are so many perspectives that are left out of reporting. That has structurally been the case since journalism was professionalized in this country.

When you think about the fact that there were Black codes and slave codes that did not allow Black people to learn how to read and write, you know those people’s stories weren’t being collected and told. Their perspectives weren’t represented in news. That continued with segregation in terms of education. It continued with segregation in the workplace. We even have that problem today with the so-called “racial reckoning” of 2020. That was all about the fact that in the news industry, news outlets were really slow to meaningfully integrate.

When we first started having conversations about what Black Twitter is and was, people referred to it as the Black press. Being a journalist, I was like, nope, that’s not it. That’s not what’s happening. Because it wasn’t that people were adhering to practices that the Black press as we know it also followed. It was that people were telling their stories in unfiltered, non-conforming ways.

I thought it was essential for journalists to understand that there’s more than one way to tell a story, more than one way to authenticate a source and to note that a source is credible. There’s more than one way to engage with an audience — instead of just putting out content or the news and waiting for people to react to it, [we can] really take advantage of the interactivity that’s made possible by technologies that were always there but [that] perhaps we did not have the time, focus, or imagination to engage with.

Clark: I think Black Twitter has challenged our widely accepted notions of what journalism is and can be. For me, it’s a space where we began to see the power struggles between journalists and the public in ways we hadn’t before. Certainly we had alternative media, but even with the creation of alternative media outlets, there’s a certain degree of capital of access — both financial capital and social capital that’s necessary for people to publish and to have their stories heard.

With Black Twitter, those pre-qualifications built on respectability and identity and racial hierarchy were erased…I think what Black Twitter has done for journalism is really offer a lens of what is possible if we let go of notions that are informed by white supremacy of what is correct.

Clark: When I first did this research for my dissertation, Black Twitter was not getting covered in the news. Then the Black press started covering what Black Twitter was talking about, but didn’t necessarily refer to it as Black Twitter; it was just Black people on Twitter.

The breakthrough came from one of the agenda-setting newspapers that we have in this country, The New York Times. I attribute it to [the Times] because although there was an earlier case — and I’ll talk about that in a moment — when Tanzina Vega wrote [for the Times] about the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown trending in Ferguson, she moved beyond the traditional ways that we source information and went directly to what people were talking about online.

She had to go out and get perspectives and narratives from people whom she could authenticate. She knew they were real people. This was not just a curiosity about how Black people were playing online — which is how Black Twitter had been covered almost up until that point by white press — but showing the inner workings of a story as it unfolded.

An earlier example of that — where the white mainstream press had to rely on the Black press to pick it up, but the Black press actually got it from Black Twitter — was the coverage of the Jena Six protests in Louisiana, where these high schoolers were suspended from their high school because of a fight. The organizing that young people did in Louisiana and across the South was one of the precursors to the organizing that we saw behind the case of Trayvon Martin and every other hashtag memorial that followed. But even that had to be authenticated by another press system before people really started paying attention to what Black Twitter was talking about.

Those are a couple of the cases that I point to from early on. There are also a number of cases that point to how Black Twitter calls out [journalistic] practices that don’t really work. One I still grapple with is delayed identification headlines and ledes — we’ll say, a person in this city did this thing, and then [we don’t] identify them by their full name [until later in the story]. One of the things that Black Twitter does, especially if it’s a person who is known within Black communities, is call them by their name. How many times have we seen that repeated, whether it’s for victims of racial violence or for people who accomplished something amazing? That’s one of those simple, everyday approaches that I think Black Twitter offers, almost on a daily basis, that shows us how journalism can be done differently.

Clark: It was essential to me that people be able to tell their own stories. I’m engaging directly in conversation, and I’m in that space with people in [multiple ways]. It’s not just being on Twitter the platform — I met folks out in the world, where we ran into each other at different [events]. I’ve been literally walking down the street and someone said, “Oh, hey, I know you, we talked about Twitter.” I feel like folks collaborated with me. I don’t know how empowered they feel by the collaboration, but it’s a different approach to doing ethnography.

It can definitely be improved upon, but for me, it was really important for people to be able to tell their stories. That also meant going back to people and checking in with them — seeing how their story had changed, what I had gotten right, what I had gotten wrong, were there other things I should have brought up?

In my dissertation acknowledgements, there is an egregious error that I made identifying someone. Because I had ongoing conversations with this person after my dissertation was published, I was called to account for that [on Twitter]. So the next opportunity that I got to [correct myself], which was the book, I did. Just like we would be making corrections in the news field, I made the correction — as the kids say — keeping that same energy. It’s important to me that someone who is a part of this research has the sense of agency to call me to do that and to have the relationship with me, to know that I’ll make it right.

Clark: Absolutely. That’s exactly what [I said], “Fuck! My book!” I called my editor, because I had already turned it in, [but] I was like, I need it back and I need time.

I did a massive rewrite. I just looked at some old drafts a couple of days ago while cleaning my office, and the initial opening of the book starts with the Los Angeles Times hiring Dexter Thomas as its Black Twitter reporter [in 2015]. That was a long time ago. How do you now tell this story almost as a history, but a history that is continuing to unfold?

Clark: It is an ongoing obit!

Clark: I got locked out of the Twitter account [@MeredithDClark] that I used to do all of this research. [In December], I got a notification from the old account that someone had logged in from Russia. I went to the new] account I created a year ago and tweeted at [my old account], “Hey, I’ve been locked out of this account for a couple of years now, but I just got a notification that someone in Russia logged into it. So if you see it posting weird stuff, just know it’s not me.”

That was devastating. There’s a ton of stuff connected to my research that is not going to look like research to anyone but me. But it’s there, and that’s the only way I can access it. Other ways I’ve experienced the degradation of Twitter [are that] too much time on social media warps your brain, your sense of reality and perception. There were times when I would have to take my own self-imposed breaks. That’s [even] before Elon Musk bought it. So with the purchase, it became more urgent to finish this chapter of the work.

But it’s sad. It hurts really deep down because it’s the severing of community connection. There are people who are there that I can only find there. That’s where I could easily be in touch with them. Now [with the] website’s functionality, I literally cannot find things. I cannot use the search function and find things I know I tweeted.

Clark: A little bit of both. I argue in the book that, whatever Black people are doing in terms of media and technology, we were doing it before Twitter. We’ll be doing it after Twitter. No matter what the technology is, we’re going to be using it, adapting it for our cultural needs and the way we engage with each other. That will continue.

But I do think that there is something specific about Black Twitter of a certain era that was indeed lightning in a bottle, and you’re not going to get that back.

Clark: I see facsimiles of it. Most of what I see is that capitalism consumes everything. I feel really old saying this, but I remember a time when people online were just having fun, not necessarily thinking about how to monetize something. There are some flashes of that every now and then, but most of what I see [now] is about building engagement to secure revenue.

Even before TikTok, people were asking what comes after Black Twitter. I was like, well, the question is: is there a Black Facebook? Is there a Black Instagram? One answer is no, because the technological affordances don’t offer the same things. But are people trying to recreate the dynamic of Black Twitter in other spaces? Absolutely. I saw it on Snapchat, I saw it on Clubhouse, I saw it on Instagram. I didn’t see it so much on Facebook because Facebook is very different. But I absolutely see it on TikTok.

The place where I’m seeing [some of that spark] now and where people are talking about it is Threads. There are a bunch of Twitter migrants and folks are like, “Don’t bring that noise from Twitter over here. We’re having a good time.” It’s like Twitter before everybody knew Twitter was popping. Please don’t bring that mess over here.