The Power of Black Twitter (feat. Michael Harriot) - Beyond the Scenes

get deeper into the origins of the problem. When we do that with daily show producers, writers, correspondents and expert guests who know a hell of a lot more about it than us to help us break it down, heaven listen. Hey, welcome to beyond the scenes, the podcast that goes deeper into segments and topics that originally aired on the daily show with Trevor Noah. Look, this, this is what you

gotta think of. This podcast is all right. This podcast is like a full stack of pancakes drizzle with Maple Syrup. I just can't have one. You know, you'd be a Brunch and then you order an extra plate for the table so you can share it with all your friends. That's what we are now. I'm Roy with JR and we're here to talk about a piece that I did in seventeen called black eye on America. On black twitter,

roll the cliff. For decades the black barbershop has been the epicenter of black cultural discussion, but the Internet has changed things. Let me introduce you to black twitter. Black twitter is an entire think that I think we need somebody more qualified. Let's go with Jimmy, little Muir, executive writer and looks importantly black person. Jimmy. What is black twitter? It's just really an extension of how we communicate in our neighborhoods and our barbershops and our churches and our schools.

It is our village. Think of black twitter as Harlem. Black folks made it cool, and a white people trying to move in what we do on social media. And of course we over index and we use it more than anybody else and we use it on mobile, which means we have it, you know, by our side twenty four hours a day. That's right. While we make up just twelve of the US population, American twitter users are black and they're three times more likely to post daily

on twitter than white people. Today I'm joined by fellow family alumni, an associate professor in media studies at Northeastern University. Matter. Meredith D Clark, welcome to be on the scenes. How you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me well, thank you. Thank you for being here. Also joining us is a brother who was a writer at the Grio and he does a lot of hard work on the ground and he also starts up a lot of mess on twitter and, you know, every nine and

then have them, folks. Mad He dropped knowledge and then he'll pivot right into did having aim, mad and startsome as if it's anybody who knows about engaging with black twitter, it's the homie Michael, Harriet, Michael. How you doing, man? I'm great. Man. Thanks for having me. Man. I appreciate you all for being here. Now let's go ahead and be real about this. We know what type of show we own. We know what type of audience the daily

show is. That's part of why we did the black twitter piece at the time time when conversations around blackness we're starting to, you know, really permeate, you know, on social media a lot more so. Meredith, for our listeners who don't know, can you define what black twitter is and explain the origins of it absolutely so. I tell people there's no special knock, there's not a separate platform, there's not a special portal that you can go to to get to black twitter. You know there's there's no

secret handshake that will get you into black twitter. But there are two ways of thinking about it. The short version that I tell people black twitter is black people on twitter. Being black on twitter like being our black selves having a good time doing what we do. The long answer is that black twitter is a series of black communities, of folks who are linked together talking about things that are of concern to our various communities, and

I really stress that plural idea of communities. So everything from racial justice, which we've seen a lot of conversations about Um, to what it's like to be on the dating market. Today we've got a lot of conversations about relationships. So every single way that people can come together and be connected, from Greek life and Hbcu life to just being black living in a certain part of the country or a certain part of the world. That is black twitter.

Also food. There's a lot of food critiquing black twitter struggle plates. If you post or plate of food, you know you might break your Grandmama's heart, because black twitter pulls no punches. Marra Keisha could tell us. Okay, I

mean I'm not wrong. It's interesting because, you know, there can be days on twitter where it is something as simple as I can't believe you put mayonnaise on a hot dog, and the next day it's should you spend two hundred dollars on the first date, and then the next day it's free Brittany Grinder, and all three of those conversations happened with the same level of ferocity and engagement. And God bless your soul if you ever find yourself on the wrong side of some of that stuff. We

call that getting ratio. We'll break that down, you know, on another podcast. But you know, this piece was set, the piece that we did it was we decided to set it in a barbershop because we felt like the barbershop, you know, in a sense, for black culture, is one of the many public squares that we have within the black community. And so you know, you know for Michael, you know, how is black twitter a part of a history of community spaces and publications for black people together

and share their stories? Well, you know, in a sense it is like the barbershop. You know, it's a communal place where we share UH information, where we share our opinions, where we share, you know, what we think of everything going on around us. And you know, although we like to think that this is new, you know it goes back to the history of black media. You know, you're talking about the North Star, you're talking about black newspapers, black radio, all of that is part of the evolution

that ended or has currently become black twitter. You know, when you think about black radio, you know white people were on a radio talking like this and then all of a sudden black people were talking the way they talked in jazz clubs on the radio and it flowed outside of the radio it it flowed into normal culture and and became part of the lexicon of America. And in a sense, black twitter is doing the same thing.

Is Black twitter the right place to have these discussions? Because, unlike the barbershop, unlike the beauty salon, unlike the Church Fellowship Hall, this is a place where everyone can get in on the conversation and you know, we talk a little bit about, you know, cultural appropriation. Does having these moments and enjoying things communally in a public forum make us more susceptible two people coming in who don't necessarily understand the origins of the conversation, don't or or oblivious

to the appropriation that they're doing. I think it's it's

a little bit of both. You know, Um, there is a certain level of resistance that I think about that is taking place, whether we are willing participants in that resistance or not, but showing up and being ourselves and bringing the whole of our experiences to this platform is one way that, by default, black people are resisting the pressures and the expectations, the norms that we do keep those conversations quiet, that we keep the family business inside

the House, Um, and that we don't engage in the same ways that we would with each other in enclaved spaces, in a very public way. The downside of that, unfortunately, in many cases, is that people extract our conversations, just as you said, without context, without any sort of real connection to what is being discussed, and they often do it for profit, for cloud, for their own sort of

privilege on the platform. And so you'll see things that black twitter talks about one day and suddenly it's a trend. It has this agenda, disrupting function, and the news media is all over it as though it's something that journalists discovered in and of themselves, when in fact it's people swooping into our conversations. You know, the old thing that we used to say back in the nineties, getting Kool aid, don't know the flavor. Um. It's common. We're sort of

used to that. We've seen it, and everything from our music and what we create Um to our intellectual production and the same things happening on the platform. We talked in season one to be on the scenes about people who steal from you know, black tiktokers, and how the things that they do and the trends that they create are not properly you know, they're not compensated for a

lot of that stuff. But you know, we can go back, I think was fifteen with Um, the girl teaches on fleek, young woman, eyebrows on fleek, and everybody was saying on fleek, but you're telling me came nobody figure out that it was that young lady who right, right, like the Damn Daniel guys. You know, they had deals with vans and all of this other stuff, and I have comes out with pancakes on fleek and everybody's brand has something that's on fleek, but no one's cutting this young woman a check.

And that's that's sort of the downside. Folks are like, you know, twitter's terms of service for so many years said what you put here, if you have a public account, is open and accessible to everyone. The problem with that is for so many years black folks have been taking, well, our Labor has been taken from us and repurpose and we see the same thing happening with black twitter. Is

twitter a place, though, Michael, where? I guess what black twitter, because you talked about one time we were gotten into a conversation online about actors who were black famous, where you have reached the peak level of stardom with black people, but a white person is like don't quite know who you are exactly, but every black person knows you, knows you.

So when you look at something like that right, like when we talk about like that conversation being so inclusive, does it rub you the wrong way when you see other people that you know are not necessarily of our culture jumping in and joining those types of conversations that are very much, you know, family discussions? I think if you haven't that discussion right on twitter, then, like my perception is that you have to care more about what

white people think. If you're going to be mad at that right like I am when I talk to black people, then I am looking at the responses of black people and I know that the people outside of the culture who respond don't know what they're talking about. It's not like if it's a doctor are going and asking somebody about diabetes and a dude on the Corner Office of opinion. The doctor doesn't take that opinion into consideration because he knows that that person didn't go to medical school. And

that's the same thing. The way I feel like, oh, there's so certain people like I play a game with myself sometimes, while else tweet something that I know only black people care about or know know what I'm talking about, and it's funny to me to see the white people trying to figure out what we're talking about. And so to be bad at those things right because it's on twitter, you're you're basically posting it onto a public bill billboard

or a bulletin board. If you're gonna do that, you have to know that white people are gonna see it and you know white people are going to say something about it or respond, and it's up to you whether or not that ways in to have some value to you or it's just something that somebody is saying as they walk past this billboard. But so, and how do

we breach the gap? How do we breach the gap from black twitter being this place that drives the narrative of conversation, especially, Oh my God, we talk about whatever show is the hottest show live tweeting. That was scandal even digging the Craig to go all the way back to papa pope means and all of that type of stuff, and insecure and like all of these live viewing experiences and the new edition movie. Oh my God, that was that was a nice to three days. So we know

that black twitter is a driver of culture. Uh, but does the media at large, using the conversations that happened on twitter, you know, trending topics and stuff like that? Has that made journalists more lazy and taking the temperature of what the public at large is into or vibing with? So it's two sides to that, right, because you know, journalism is mostly a white profession, right, my think you know, in the major news organizations it's at most six percent black.

So for most of history what we call mainstream, which is translated as white media, would only consider, you know, or include the opinions of white people because they were no black no, what we're no white people telling the truth about black people and there were no black people in the newsroom saying hey, you might have this wrong.

And so, in a sense, you know, they could go on twitter now and see what black people are saying about a certain thing that they might not have access to, uh, in the newsroom or as just as a white person like you know, one of the things I do, like when I covered Ferguson of Baltimore, right, and it's the thing that I do, and when I cover anything that happens in a black neighborhood. Now, y'all would know this.

If you go to the store, it's always one store in that neighborhood where you could just go sit in front and there's people in front of that store was just hanging out and if you talk to them you can get the emperature and gage the temperature or the climate of that neighborhood. Right. White people can't do that.

White people don't even know that they can, and then if they go, you know, it's a white man holding a microphone versus, you know, somebody who looks like them, who talks like them, who knows what to ask them, who is going to be sympathetic. So, uh, the two sides right. In some aspects, twitter gives us a voice that we wouldn't have never had in mainstream media and on the other side it does make, you know, give white journalists more access than they would have had as

white journalists. So it kind of prevents news rooms from, you know, hiring black people because they can say, Oh, you could just go ask somebody on twitter, take a twitter pole, instead of just going to a black neighborh we're gonna hire a black dude to go look into

the black stuff and report the black news. As a journalism professor, one of the things that I teach my students all the time is that you it's like the analogy that Michael made earlier, and you don't necessarily listen to the guy who can go to medical school about something and just take what the guy on the corner is saying at face value, right, and that's akin to what I see with taking these tweets out of context, embedding them in a story or making them the story.

You know, there's a big difference between source development and then just straight up co optation. It's possible for journalists to get on twitter, to actually develop sources on twitter, to reach out to people. You know, the D M s are there. You can reach out and say, Hey, I see you tweeting about this thing. Can we have a conversation about it um and effectively reach more black people than they would with shoe leather reporting that they're supposed to be doing but maybe don't have the time

to do. But to just simply take what you see or observe what you see and report on that. That's what led us to a lot of miss and disinformation in communities and around the election. It's what leads to a warped sense of what black people in America are experiencing today, because you're going to get on black twitter all kinds of black people from all different walks of life. If you show up with one narrative out of that, then you've done a major disservice to reporting on black

folks in America at large. Y'All know, if, like if somebody goes on twitter and like Roy said something and I said something. You know, to a white person it becomes, or to a white reporter a lot of times, that this is what black people this is what people think. Oh my God, it's you know what I have to do now, Michael? I have to when something breaks and I got a joke or I have an opinion, I

have to wait thirty six hours. I have to wait for those articles to run because if I make the joke about the thing and I'm just being silly, it's not what my intention was. It's how it's presented. The true thing, the truth, the truth is what people choose to believe. So when they go people uh, perfectly, this is a this is a this isn't as serious of an example, but this is a perfect example of what

I'm talking about. Then, earlier this year that the chacoal Taco was gonna get discontinued and I made a quick tweet just I just didn't even think. I'm watching better call Sault Leton just tweeted Chacol tacoing dead good and the drumstick is terrible. To send phone down. Wake up the next morning and I'm in two or three different compilation tweet articles going people or outrage. Roy Wood Jr is very adamant. No, I wasn't. That's not what and

the same thing can happen with with political tweets. If I make if I say something about this selection or this. We did, Um, you know, we did a little sketch about Herschel Walker and the whole illegitimate children thing or whatever, and that guy put in the article with the other

Herschel Walker tweets. So now you have people in my D M S and I can only imagine what your d Ms Are like, Michael, because your ass be going in way harder than me half the time and you have people ready to jump on you about stuff and I'm like, I was just tweeting. Yeah, but you also have to understand, just like I was saying earlier, right,

those people don't know what they're talking about. If they're just scanning tweets and see one of my tweets and included in a compilation of tweets, they don't know what I'm talking about. They don't know about black people, they don't know about me, they don't know what this what I'm talking about, the subject that I'm talking about and so you know, in a sense, again, you have to ascribe to what white people say some level of importance

to even care about that thing. Right, I do not care what white people are thinking when I'm talking to black people. Now, not not what white people are thinking, but when I'm talking to my people. The people who do not know what I'm talking about have no value in that conversation though, right. You know, like everybody, black person knows, like you can, it's certain cousins you can't

sit next to at a funeral. It's not that they're making a macria the dead, it's just that they joke, crack jokes all the time, and you know if your Mama looked back there and see you, she's going to say you're being disrespectful to the church, to God, to Jesus, to the dead person. But she was not listening to your cousin crack those jokes, and it was a good joke.

Why they bury him in that jacket? That jacket, he never had no suit like that, even on pass anniversary, and now they got him dead, the jacket over the

jacket up after the break. I would love to get into the ways that black twitter contributes to the counter narrative and pushes back against the stereotypes that mainstream media pushes and also, you know, I want to unpack a little bit about the social justice side of black twitter and the number of things that I believe we're able to happen because there were people on the Internet raising noise and raising hell. This is beyond the scenes. We'll

be right back. Welcome back. We are talking about black twitter now. We're broken down what it is, how it's use, how people misuse it and some of the topics that are discussed on black twitter. But narrative. I want to get to the serious side of it now and how black twitter is able to influence, you know, conversations. You know you've often referred to, you know, black twitter having the ability to to create a digital counter narrative and, you know, shift the way that black people are depicted

in the mainstream media. What did you mean by that exactly, and how it's black twitter helped, helped to contribute to that? Yeah, so I talk about black twitter creating counter narratives because, as a journalist and as someone who studies journalism in the way that we communicate, I think about how news media has the potential to shape our social realities. Right. So the issues of the day, the way that they're

reported on. That's the way people understand them, and we know that to be true, especially about black folks, with a kind of coverage that we've otten over the years. We see coverage about our communities that is generally crime focused. When you see more than one black face, they are either a public figure, like a celebrity or a politician, or they're an athlete. We see those overrepresentations and we see this coverage that gives you a singular narrative about

black people in black life in America. What black twitter does is pushes back on those narratives and it allows us to present multiple narratives all at the same time about our lived experiences. So everything from the way that we experience the workplace, right, we talked about Um one of the hashtags that's near and dear to my heart black in the ivory, so what it's like to be

black in academia. But we talk about everything from our hair and what it means when someone touches it to what legislation that is going to impact our communities is like. I think one case that really stands out to me about black folks and counter narrative is the assumption that all black pep for our democrats and willingly and enthusiastically voting Democrat. Right. But then you saw out of black twitter,

a Hashtag like girl. I guess I'm with her, the resignation that people had in like yeah, Hillary, Hillary Clinton. You know, we're not excited about her candidacy, but if it's gonna Save America, which we tried to do, Um, then we're going to vote for her. And so that's what I mean when I talk about digital counter narratives.

The digital allows us to do it all in the same place, at the speed of light, uh, and in a number of different voices all at the same time, and that's really important to getting a more accurate picture of what our lives are like. It has also become a place where there's been real reporting happening in real time, and so then it can't be spun by anybody in the media. Um about it. I guess it's coming up on two years, Mike, UM, post Charlottesville, in the rise

of the let me just call it. How are we gonna spend this? Uh, the motivated public unpermitted removal of confederate monument across this nation was occurring a lot of different spots and Um series of motivated fine citizens were showing up to the local town squares and time ropes the statues and getting them ships up out of there, as they should have. And you know, things in Birmingham

got a little, you know, unsettled. And Michael, I remember you being one of the journalists who like this concept of journalistically. I will go there and tomorrow you will have my report. But there's also no let me tell you all right now, before somebody take my phone because the police might be tripping. Let me how much has black twitter been an asset in making sure that, as

a journalist, you're able to deliver the truth faster? Yeah, well, so what Roy is talking about is I was arrested covering a protest over a confederate monument and the clan supposedly coming to show up. Everything was stripped from me, but luckily I had a watch, an Apple Watch, on and was able to tweet that I've been arrested and that was the only way that people knew I'd been arrested for covering a protest. They wouldn't believe I was

a journalist. They wouldn't believe anything that I said and it was black twitter that basically got me out of jail. Um someone called the lawyer and literally, you know, build me out. So you know it's it's important to activists men. When you think about it, right, it's important to justice. You think about the people who were convicted of Derek Chauvin being convicted of killing George Floyd. Well, the main reason he was convicted was because there was a bunch

of black people around holding cameras. They would not have been holding those cameras and recording him if there was not a place for them to show that footage unfiltered. For the previous you know, two D and fifty years, all we had was what the police told us. Right, I have been a journalist in a newsroom watching other journalists just copy and paste of police report into an

article about what happened at certain incidents. And now, because of the transparency offered by black twitter, we can counter those narratives of rioting or police brutality or many of the issues that black people have faced. And white people simply wouldn't be active because they didn't believe us, which also changes the nature of reporting on top of that.

That's why, that's why I always love when I see, you know, a black person and posted something good, when you're look into replies to the tweet and it's like some news organization, Hey, can we use this clip? There's some there's some good report right here. Is it? Do you authorize us? Uh, when we talk about, you know, the hashtags that twitter used, which I think is an important I don't like this about activism, but I understand

why we need it. Therefore, it is important. Black twitter has a way of boiling things down to a sentence, or twitter's case, it's a Hashtag. Like if we just go black lives matter, Oscar, so white, everything can sit comfortably under that umbrella. I do think that some issues are a little more nuanced and it's like, like abolish

the police. If you ask ten black people what they mean when they say abolished the police, YOU'RE gonna get about three or four different constructs of what that concept is. So sometimes hashtags don't always give the nuance that I think a topic needs. But the Hashtag brings attention and it starts the conversation and in a lot of cases it actually brings about some type of change. Meredith like, could you talk a little bit about how those Hashtags

have contributed to action, you know, offline? Absolutely so. I talked about this Um as I write about it, as the process of affirmation and reaffirmation. So when we tweet with these hashtags and someone responds to them in a number of ways, like the retweeting, the quote, tweeting, the building on what we've said, that's affirmation. You know that someone else online has heard what you've said. Reaffirmation is what happens when those hashtags go offline and they are

used to a certain end. I actually moved to Charlottesville the day after the so called events of August eleven and twelfth with the White Supremacist March. Find people on both sides. Yet man, listen. I wasn't very interested in figuring that out with my new neighbors. But one thing that carried over from online to offline, where all these black lives matter signs. I saw them everywhere and it was a way for people to sort of signal that I'm I'm one of the good ones right, I'm an

okay person. This wasn't me, this wasn't Charlotte'Sville, and so, in a number of ways we see hashtags sort of do wing the hard work of communicating to people what the aims of a particular slogan or a particular message are. In the case of something like defund the police or abolish the police. Um, I don't think that, you know, those have been as effective as they could have been. You can see how very quickly the message gets misappropriated.

It gets misinterpreted because when people talk about defund they're not just simply talking about cutting off the budget numbers, but they are pushing you to have a conversation about what it would be like to redirect the millions of dollars that we spend in policing and over policing black and brown communities in particular, and put that back into the services that are needed in the community to make sure that we don't need to call police or to

fortify exactly keep going. You know. So, no, that's it. That's it that in so many ways, the Hashtag have basically cut through the bureaucracy and the conversations and have forced people to say, Hey, this is a different direction that we should at least listen to or think about. There's another part of this conversation that we need to have.

I would argue that, like, you know, this stuff like defund the police and like people getting lazy and just wanting to tweet black lives matter, those people are gonna do what they were going to do anyway. Like the people who just tweet black lives matter and say that's their activism, they weren't gonna do anything for black people anyway. The people who are arguing against the Hashtag defund the police, they are going to not support any effort to reform

policing in America anyway and deformed. The defund the police is just the thing that they last on to to cast the gate, and it could have been anything, like, you know the civil rights movements were. They were communists and black power movement was anti white, right. So whatever black people say, they're going to be a contingent of people who are saying the opposite. Those people are going to exist, regardless of whether it's on twitter or in

a newspaper, on TV, on the radio. Don't and so I don't think black people uh hashtags or turning white people negative, but I do think it is coalescing a group of people, of black people, who's like I thought I was the only one who thought we should defund the police. Like I thought I was the only one who had the idea of decreasing police funding. And those people see like minded people on the Internet and it

coalesces into a movement. So I think overall is good, because the negative people were going to be negative regardless of what the Hashtag was. was like take a dollar away from the police. That would they would have never gonna be a phrase that there was never gonna be

a magic phrase that pays. That got them on board. Okay, but then if we talk about the effectiveness of of Hashtags, like if we just go with Brittney grinder and everything that is that is transpired with Britney Grinder and as we talked about in the first break, the media follows a lot of what black people be talking about and then they present that as the national conversation on the thing.

And sometimes it could be misinformation. Sometimes y'all could just be pulling tweets about US talking about beyonce, whatever, whatever, right, but then that same media is also the one that would listen to the ways that people were you know, because this is bigger than what people in the w NBA were doing, but then it was also black twitter that was taking those clips and putting those clips out on social to build more awareness about what was happening

with Brittney Grinder and making sure that that conversation did not fall to the back page, you know, to the back page of you know, newspapers and conversations. So in a way, does that same media attention to black twitter when the stuff that really ain't their business and they don't really know and they get it wrong? Does that same media attention to some degree helped create momentum for a lot of these conversations, like even, like if you say, like even if we don't go Britney Grinder, we go

further back with bring back our girl. You know, I'll be honest, that's one. When we talk about abduction. I was extremely educated by that Hashtag. So does the attention that black twitter gets from mainstream media in the case of activism, does it help? Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, on the whole right, because, I mean, when we talk about journalism, we talk about news, it's just like music is, just like art is, just like every

other thing in America. Like white people are going to follow what black people do, like by the time they're talking about it, we've had the conversation. So, you know, in a sense it amplifies the conversations that black people were having yesterday today. And, you know, take this, you know, the conversation around police brutality. You know, a lot of people think, well, you know, since Obama, black people really came became, you know, obsessed and mad about police brutality.

Luther King was talking about police brutality in the I have a dream speech right. So, in a since our conversation about police brutality has come to white people's attention because of the conversations we were having online, because of the Hashtag black lives matter, because we were posting those videos. Now they have evidence that it's not just, you know, a couple of people in Detroit and a couple of

mad people in l a over Rodney King. It is a national thing that transcends geography and time and, you know, the police departments. It's a national problem and I think that's what black twitter and social media black people or social media give voice to our concerns. Yeah, I think that the contributions that black twitter makes um to national coverage of the issues that matter to us with things

like Britney griner. That is one of the cases that particularly nuanced, because the message that we got from the federal government was that we didn't want to make a big fuss about this in case of some diplomatic issues. Right. So there's this problem that we now have to navigate as black folks, like how do we advocate for one of our own and make sure that her name stays on people's minds and make sure that people don't forget that she's there and that we need to bring her home,

but also not put her in danger? We're already dealing with the devaluation of black life in our home country, right, and now we've got to deal with it as a diplomatic problem. We've basically all been deputized into the State Department at this point that we are having to act as a diplomatic corps to at least get our news media to pay attention to this story and to continue to keep the focus on it. I think black twitter does an excellent job with that, and it's just as

Michael said. You know, this is bringing up things that we have been talking about four years. We've talked for years about our mistreatment when we visit other countries. We may not have been arrested, we may not be detained, we not be may be held by Um, a country that for a long time, I'm like as long as I've been alive, has been considered an enemy of the United States. How we got shot me with Russia in the last few years, I still don't understand. Uh Oh, listen,

I'm trying to be nice. I'm trying to be nice, but you know, we we have talked about this. We've talked about what it's like to be mistreated in another country and to know that the U s government is not necessarily going to come to your aid. And so now we're pushing people to have more of that conversation and to say this is not just about high profile basketball star, a queer woman who is locked up in

in Russia because of some trumped up charges. This is about what it is like to be black in this world and to know that, even though y'all, y'all tell us that we're not grateful for being citizens here, you show us that you're not really invested in US being a part of America, and this is an example of that. And so it brings all of those nuances to the conversation into the coverage in ways that we haven't been

able to have those conversations before. Talk a little bit, both of you, about the political influence that black twitter has had. You know, when we talk about Georgia, Filipp and blue and a couple of years before that Doug Jones taking old Roy Moore off the sticks in Alabama and as in Alabama, and I know part of that happened because they were literally organizing driving people to the polls and all of the gerrymandered asked districts where the

Poland station was way off the city bus route. So the influence that black twitter has on elections and its ability to get people registered to vote. You know, how much do you do we have? Here's here's the question. Here's here's a question of both you. Do we have Barack Obama and Stacy Abrams without social media? Oh, definitely not. Right, UM, neither. Not Even Obama, maybe because he was like earlier, Obama

was my space is, but so so. I was living in South Carolina when Obama ran into I was an eight and I was covering him. There's no way, like the black people in South Carolina would have even considered that a black man could be president if not for social media, because everybody around them in South Carolina, like one of the most racist states in the country, would have said, ain't no way, like they'll kill the first right.

But when we saw the momentum build online, remember, one of the things that social media does, and black twitter does, is wipe away the constraints of having to depend on the narrative given by white people. Right. So, you know Hillary Clinton, remember, everybody thought that Hillary Clinton was the shooting for that race, and right, and the only people who weren't saying it was like the people online saying, I think I'm gonna just support this brother and see

what's happening. And then we saw so many people do it that we saw that it was possible. And the same can be true with Stacey ables and definitely, you know, uh Democrat winning and becoming a senator in Alabama, like no one would have thought that was possible. Black people, specifically black women in Alabama, and they did that and they're organizing. was done a lot of it online. We're knocking also off in Georgia as well. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Oh yeah, no, I wholeheartedly agree. And even going back Um,

as far as Barack Obama's election. Um, there are a number of case studies that look at how the Obama campaigns made effective use of social media messaging and, honestly, presidential campaigns and gubernatorial races and Senate races, Congressional races, those all follow a certain part, a chapter two of the Obama playbook, because what the Obama campaign showed was how you could go directly connect with people who feel like they are disenfranchised, who know that they are disenfranchised,

energize them and get them to a part of the political process. That is the way that Barack Obama was able to win. He was able to push past Um, sort of those people who were disenchanted and jaded with the systems as we knew it, and get through on a message of hope. Hope, are you kidding me? Hope does not pay bills, hope does not necessarily move people to take time off of work to go out and vote.

So effective messaging and being able to communicate with people where they are used to receiving messages and also where they see those messages supported by people they know and trust. That is what makes the difference, and that is why we were able to see, uh, some victories in Georgia, with Georgia flipping blue, with mobilizing voters in Alabama. But I think that it is shortsighted to say that that

is the only driver. And you know, we can look at jerrymandering and all of the redistricting that's being done now and see exactly where the next part of the playbook has to come in into play. Let's talk for a second here, just you know, about people who try to infiltrate these conversations and influence and change them. You know, it's one thing to have bots, but then we also have people that try to permeate these conversations and pretend to be black and they try to talk but, you know,

a little black slag. They try to put a little, as efforty would call it, put a little slanguage on their conversation. How much of a threat are those types of people to the conversations at large happening on black twitter? Uh, not much because, like, black people know, like you know, when it's a white person pretending to be black. Um,

you can tell. And then you know when they try to spread disinformation, you can tell when it's you know, a person who is susceptible to disinformation is going to be susceptible to any kind of disinformation, right. But the people who you know are smart, like you on the Internet, when you look that twitter, right, you can go google

everything somebody tells you. So you know, I always say man like you gotta be able to distinguish between the dumb people and the smart people, because there is no fine special fun for dumb people, right, there's no stupid fun Um. You know that. It's the same size and the same uh, it's not italicized or anything as the

people who know things, right. But the good thing is you're on the Internet, right, and it's not like that opinion or that disinformation or that stupid thing that people say is not, you know, sandwich between something that a smart person says or something said by somebody who actually

knows things. And and I always tell people like you, Wan't you just talk to people, look for people who know things and let's take their information on the subject in which they know because, like you know, there's like I love Lebron James and I think he is one of the smartest basketball players in the world, but I'm not listening to Lebron James Give me financial advice, because Lebron James got a billion dollars right. So listen to smart people who know things about the things they are

talking about, like the old addicts. You don't take recipes from skinny people. Yes, exactly. One thing that Michael brings up that I appreciate, but I also sometimes have some

trouble with. Like you can find anything on the Internet, and one thing that we are now seeing a lot of problems with is, although you can go and you can verify information that you find, you really have to be careful about that verification because there are folks who spend their whole lives creating information sub ecosystems where they put out info that helps confirm the misleading beliefs that

you are beginning to accept. Right. But one thing about black twitter, and I think that sort of inoculates us against this, is if you look at the structures of black twitter and how black twitter really came to be, it was first people were there because people that they knew we're there. And if you go back to that level of personal communities, when someone is spitting misinformation and you start talking to other people in your life, away

from the keyboard, offline, about what they are spitting. That's where you start running into some of the dissonance that makes you go search out the information that you need to find out what the truth is. And Sofia Noble's book, her algorithms of oppression, she talked about very extensively how you can't just tell folks to go google something because Google is an ad company, right. They get paid to bring you information based on how different subscribers are turning

over ad dollars. So we really have to to take some care with people, and I think about that specifically with folks who are older and folks who are younger. You know, my mom had questions for me about five G and I had to sit down and have a patient conversation with her, a non judgmental one, about what this was all about, even though people in her social groups were talking about things they heard on the Internet.

I also have to have the same sort of conversations with my ten year old niece about what she sees on the Internet and what is real and what is not, and that even though you can go to a website and find something that says X, Y Z, that may not necessarily be so. So we have to talk about Um some of that information and parsing it and making sure that it is what it purports to be as well, to that point about misinformation. After the break we're gonna

bring this conversation home. Michael, I want to talk to you about your book that you've written. That is all about giving people the real information, the real history. This book is a real already it's probably already banning C R T. are you on the bandle ship? If not, it's going to be coming. That's how you know it's good, because they're trying to ban it. Be on the scenes. We'll be right back bringing it home. We're talking about,

you know, black twitter. I want to talk about the future of it in a second, but first, Meredith, what do they say? What do they say on clubhouse? I want to dovetail if I could, if I could piggyback off or something. You can expand. We talked about seeking truths, seeking understanding about what our history is and how many different digital potholes have been set up to obstruct us from getting those truths. And Michael, you're you know, you're

fighting back against that. You know personally, you know you're using black twitter to educate people about, you know, these untold stories of American history. The book is black. I'M gonna say black is history, the unwhitewashed story of America. But for the title, because I know the publisher can't put as fuck, so they put black a F history and that's coming out in January. What was your breaking point? You Go, you know what, I gotta write a book. I'm tired all of this. Um, sick of it. Y'All

keep twisting and remixing the truth. Were my keyboard. So Um, I was home schooled and so it wasn't until recently that, you know, when, when all these conversations about the confederacy and all of these founders and Jefferson, when all those started, I realized, Oh, people just don't know stuff about history. Like you know, I didn't know how little the average

American knows about history. And then, like it was a couple of years ago when I realized, Oh, they learned about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and all that stuff and how great they were, and then like six seven years later they learned about slavery and that's why they can't like comport that this the founding fathers were also human traffickers. And so what this book is is the story of black people in America. And

so we ain't talking about James Garfield's political campaign. We're talking about what black people were going to our perspectives and the unwhite watched, the UN erased stories that we've been missing from our history books. Like, for instance, like nobody, like when I used to ask people about head rights and they always say what was that? And I was like, Oh, y'all didn't know. Like the first people that came to America got fifty acres for every slave that they brought here.

So people were thinking like, Oh, the slaves came here to do the white people's working, to make them wealthy, and I was like no, the slaves is what made the white people wealthy. Right Um, but nobody knows about head rights. And it was how the blue blood families of this country gained their wealth, not from owning the stuff that slaves produced, but the actual bodies of the slaves is what gave them their power and their intergenerational wealth that is still persist to this day. So, like

that's what this book is about. Like these untold stories that like they just skipped over when you were in the sixth grade social studies class. When we talk about that misinformation, you know I am made product of public schools and when I think shout out to Birmingham in street, Middle School ramp in high school. I know that White Book publishers are part of the issue when it comes to misinformation and omissions from history and CRT is boiling up now and they want to take more history out

of the textbooks and referred to the enslaved. What was they trying to refer to? The enslaves ass and the Texas Um, voluntary involuntary immigrants. It's some remixed ask word to try to take the pain and the truth out of what actually happened. How do we create more fair representation of the contributions of black people in American history? And you know, and and how? And what role does entertainment play? And that as well Hollywood. You know, some of the things that we have to think of are

using the tools that we have available to us. That is one thing that black people in the United States have done since time immemorial and black people throughout the world. I specifically referred to our history in the United States, because when I wrote about black twitter, I used what the opening salvo was of the first black newspaper that was published in the United States, and that was my

twist on it. It was we wished to plead our own cause, we wish to tweet our own cause, and so, in the same way that Michael Talks about this being, you know, just another medium, the facts are there. We have used every medium that has existed, uh, to tell the stories as they were, not as people wanted them to be. So Black newspaper publishers wrote about what it was like to be black in that era. They covered the civil rights movement when white newspapers would not want to.

My hometown paper, the lettings and Herald leader, had to publish a front plage apology in the early two thousands about their failure to cover the civil rights movement, or they neglected, actually is the word, that they neglected to cover the civil rights movement and reologize for that error. But we were there, using our cameras, using newspapers, using magazines, radio, um, even programs in church right to tell the story of

our people in its entirety. It's one of the reasons I'm writing a book on Black Twitter, to make sure that that history is there and that it's accurate. And so we use the tools that we have to present these narratives alongside the ones that people are told. They sometimes disrupt the narrative, they counter them Um they give you a completely different picture or a more complete picture, and that is the way that we get down to that. We also refuse the way that people want to talk

about our stories. So one of my personal commitments is to not say C R t. It is critical race theory. It is an actual theory. It applies to how we think about power and economics and race and all of those things working together. I don't take the shortcuts, because that's what people do when they're trying to re spind the narrative, and I say we spell it out, we tell it how it is, and that is the way

that we take back our history and present the truth. So, as you write this book on Black Twitter, this would be a great place for us to end with the two of you. What does the future of black twitter look like? Because we understand its power, we understand it's worth.

Now you know I am very much a web one point, oh aged individual I came up in the a o l chat rooms and then the yahoo chat rooms, which had the voice feature, and then there was a little bit of my space and before I skipped over Angel Fire and Black Planet. That was sprinkling there as well. Yeah, yeah, where were you on in the dorms? Oh No, I was in gibbs hall, but I went to the Coleman Library to get on the Internet because that dial up, that dial up in the dorm was atrocious. My roommate

was always on the phone. Long distance relationship as an the internet. Where does it go? You know, I know for a minute during the shutdown there. You know, these introduced. There's there's been the introduction of APPs like clubhouse and twitter spaces where you can have real time voice conversations and quasi tech talk, fireside chats. Sometimes they're ratchets, sometimes they're eloquent and very, you know, helpful conversations. But where

do you all see the evolution? You know, Meredith, I'll start with you. You know, as you know, there's rumors that Elon Musk was gonna buy twitter and now he might not. He May. The end there was rumors that Donald Trump might come back to twitter. Then they're talking about adding a button where you could moderate and switch stuff up. If those things come true, any of those things come true and black people migrate from the platform, you know, where do we go? What? What happens next?

I mean what happens next is what has always happened with black people in any sort of technology. Where the technology is, there will my people be also a right. We are going to be wherever the web goes. Um, we were there in the beginning and we're going to continue to be there. We're gonna be in the metaverse. We're already in the metaverse. I think the challenge right now is, as technologies evolve and develop Um, that we work on making those changes so that we don't extend

the same racist practices into those new spaces. The other thing that I think when I get this question about what's next for black twitter, is that I remind people that all of the media forms that we had before today, the major ones, have not gone away. We still have radio, we still have print, we still have television. We are going to have social media in some way, shape or form in the future, whether it's this platform or another one.

We're still gonna be there. They'RE gonna be the folks who just you know, I'm probably gonna be one of them. Like twitter is my platform. I don't dig snapchat. clubhouse wants too much of my information to use. I'm probably still going to be on twitter. So black twitter, regardless of whether Elon Musk goes through with this purchase or donald trump comes back or whatever, you can't out to black people. WE'RE gonna be wherever we want to be,

using the technology the way that we want to use it. Michael, you're always having to reach the people to spread a message as well. How do you see this? How do you see this going in the future? Yeah, so I think, you know, it's hard to predict where technology is going. But one thing you know about black people, where its music, whether it's poetry, whether it's fighting, whether it's TV, black people are going to find a way to tell our

story to each other. And so, wherever it goes, like it's probably gonna be somewhere in the metaverse or in the you know, the digital reality or virtual reality where, like, you know, black people might create a wor kindom where white people can't come and it's really like, you know, you gotta have one of those tattoos on your lips or you know, you gotta, you know, we gotta hear how you sound on the phone before you can talk, before you can come in. But wherever it is, black

people are gonna be dead. Black people going to lead the way and then there's gonna be some white people on the side trying to get in to the club. And that is the history of media in America. That is the future of media in America and media in the world. Black people are going to transform it into a thing that helps us connect with each other. There's already something starting to happen in the world of, you know,

Oculus and Meta. You know, I have a VR headset and there's an APP all space vr where, you know, there's black mixers and talk shows and round tables and debates and relationship talk. So I think as that technology becomes cheaper and easier for people to build and design, then we'll probably see more opportunities for black people in those spaces. This has been a wonderful, wonderful conversation. Thank you all, both for coming on and going beyond the

scenes with me today. Thank you. Thank you. Listen to the daily show beyond the scenes on apple podcast, the IHEART radio APP or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the daily show weeknights at eleven t central on comedy central and stream full episodes anytime on paramount plus. This has been a comedy Central Podcast