BlackPlanet? Tumblr? Or, God forbid — MySpace?
Those were some of the alternatives to Twitter floated by Black users contemplating leaving the social media platform following news that Elon Musk is buying it in a $44 billion deal. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer’s plans for the brand center around fixing what he calls “free speech” problems, but his complaints have relied heavily on the dog whistles of the extremely online segment of the political right. That has Black Twitter users, along with other minorities, worried that the floodgates are about to be swung open for harassment, abuse and more.
Plenty of Twitter Inc.’s left-leaning users are already howling at the Musk deal. But the potential for the platform to lose many of its Black users — or #BlackTwitter to those in the know — could mean financial blowback for the company, which saw its social media app grow to prominence at least in part because of the cultural and social-justice discourse that Black users made popular. Researchers at Old Dominion University and Radford University have called African-American users “some of the most influential” on the app.
