Is Black Twitter the internet at its best?

A new Hulu docuseries called Black Twitter: A People's History explores how the lively online community transformed pop culture as we know it.

Culture commentator Marlon Palmer & activist Syrus Marcus Ware join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to reminisce about viral moments from Black Twitter history, and discuss how the social media niche became a juggernaut for change.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Marlon, I guess when people think about Twitter, they go, "Well, how different could it be? Because I understand the mechanics of Twitter. You post a thing, and repost a thing." But there are different ways of interacting with the platform: everyone responds to and quote tweets everything, and everyone is supposed to know what you're talking about because Black Twitter is kind of locked into a single or a couple of conversations a day. How do you think that etiquette and that formality, if you will, ended up forming?

Marlon: I think people understood that there were unspoken rules about how you engage on Twitter, and especially just seeing if you try to divert and go to a different topic that you just felt like talking about, when everybody's focused on this one thing, you're seeing no one's even interacting with you. So if I want to be a part of the conversation then I have to join in with whatever today's or this week's topic is.

Plus, when we talk about Twitter, you're talking about a lot of people who throughout their childhood went unheard — let's be very real. We want to get our thoughts out, and who's more unheard than Black people? That's why we have so much to say on the platform and we share so much — because we want to relate. We want to find people who share our experiences.

Elamin: I love the idea of a joke that feels disembodied to people if you're not a part of the Black Twitter community, because people will just tweet the thing completely out of context, but if you know, then absolutely you know.

I want to talk a little bit about how this space was really funny, Marlon — way funnier than people give it credit for. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of your most memorable hashtags or viral moments?

Marlon: I feel like any time an award show is on, those are the greatest. Like when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock? That was a MOMENT on Black Twitter.

Elamin: You had to be there.

Marlon: All of Twitter was joining in, but specifically Black Twitter if you were in that community at that time, the jokes were flying. I feel like the best times to be a part of Black Twitter are when the world is in the worst place. When we heard there might be nukes being sent off and World War, the jokes were flying because that's the only way we know how to cope. So I think ironically, some of the brightest times are the darkest moments.

Elamin: The thing that I think about, Syrus, when I think about Black Twitter is intimacy. There's a real intimacy to the way that you end up sharing that space, if you will, and that is the intimacy of Black people gathered in a room, kind of perfectly translated onto the digital world.

Syrus: It feels like we're kiking, you know? Black Twitter really felt like we were just hanging on the stoop after the party, talking about what we had just seen or what we had just experienced in the day. It really did have this feeling like we were gabbing with some close friends — not talking to a million strangers on the internet, but rather we were in a community.

Elamin: When I think about Black Twitter, I think of the way that it managed to force certain conversations on the broader culture that the broader culture didn't want to have — Black Lives Matter being a very good example of this. But also, the word "woke" certainly existed before the internet, but Black Twitter brought that word to the Internet and then sort of forced people to engage with the idea of what does it mean to be engaged in social justice? Is one of the legacies of Black Twitter that it's still able to force people to deal with a conversation that if they could, they would put off, Syrus?

Syrus: I would absolutely say that it made us think, what would it look like if the world was different? I mean, we were watching Black Twitter unfold at a time when there were unprecedented police killings of Black people. You were seeing it literally on Twitter every single day, and the summer of 2016, the summer of 2020, it galvanized people. They said, "We want to be engaged in this. We want to be awake to the dangers that are facing us." In embracing this idea that being awake to racial injustice was an important and beautiful quality of a functioning society, it's so strange that now woke has become this slur — because of course, being awake to racial injustice is something we should all want to be able to be alert to.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ryan Chung.