Black People, Please Stop Using Twitter (If We Do, Maybe The Researchers Will Go Away)
So I want to talk about #blacktwitter, but first, this:
Remember that Jurassic Park scene, where Alan Grant and Lex are in the Jeep, and the T. rex flips the car over and both characters are tossed from the car? Lex starts to scream and Alan Grant grabs her, and grunts:
Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move.
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Alan Grant’s logic is as follows: The T. rex has lousy vision, and is attracted to motion. So if they don’t move, the T. rex will be confused and won’t recognize them as prey. It will move on to something else.
So, in light of that airtight science, I'd like to make a proposal. Everyone black on Twitter, or everyone that could be perceived as black: stop using Twitter. For maybe, like, a week.
If we do, maybe the researchers will get confused and go away.
The Black Twitter Project
Yesterday, the USC Annenberg Lab announced their DSAIL Black Twitter Project, which is "working toward an understanding of highly active sub-community of Twitter users often self-identified as 'Black Twitter.' "
It's not surprising, really. Over the past few years, everyone's been writing about this "Black Twitter" thing. Slate did it, TIME did it, Salon did it. Hell, even I took a shot at it.
But right off the bat, this study seemed off. The language in the press release seemed dismissive of black people, or as one person said, it made black people sound like zoo animals to be poked and prodded.
This "observation of *Black twitter*" phenomenon is getting more and more like a zoo
— W.E.B.B.I.E DuBois (@fivefifths) September 3, 2014
Part of the initial freak out might have been the faces associated with the project. When the page first went up, it listed three main researchers, with a white man named François Bar listed as the sole Project Owner.
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All of a sudden, though, after the Internet started making fun of them, they bumped François over to feature another project leader, who just so happens to be a black woman.
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This sudden move left people with a lot of questions:
Was this sudden addition a coincidence, a simple oversight? Could be. Was this woman on the project the whole time, and they just forgot to include her face and name when they made the press release? Probably. Did François get demoted from Sole Project Owner within the space of four hours? It's possible.
And: does this last-minute addition of a black face to the team look suspiciously like a desperate attempt to cover themselves after realizing that the entire Internet is aware that there's something awfully racist and invasive about this whole thing?
Yeah.
As it turns out, Dayna Chatman, the lone black person on the team, is actually supposed to be the leader of this project. But she was not consulted for this press release. According to her blog, she has no idea why the project was described as it was.
In other words, a black researcher was erased from a study about black people. This does not bode well for the project.
If she is actually the boss of the operation—which she doesn't actually appear to be, really, as she is clearly not calling the shots—and she can't even trust her own workers to not grossly misrepresent her aims on a press release, how are we supposed to trust USC to not exploit their subjects?
Perhaps USC isn't the place to be doing this sort of research.
But Wait, Why Is Everyone Talking About Black Twitter?
It seems like a basic question, but seriously—why is the concept of black people on the Internet so fascinating?
Yes, it is true that a rather high percentage of black people use—roughly 18 percent of the userbase is black. But right behind that are Hispanics, at 12 percent.
In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has been focusing on Hispanics, who, as Twitter has been telling potential advertisers, "Tweet more often than other users, and activity among them rises when the conversation is about technology."
Twitter even recently hired a multicultural strategist, Nuria Santamaria, who is best known for her "passion for the Latino market." Appropriately enough, for her first job, she's going to be "starting with Hispanics."
Not blacks.
That is, Hispanics are a booming market, and are heavier users than any other demographic. And Twitter is very interested in bringing them and advertisers together: so interested that they hired an expert on the subject.
But For Some Reason, We're All Stuck on Black People. Why?
One of these answers may have something to do with the fact that studying "Hispanic Twitter" would involve a working knowledge of Spanish. In other words, it would require some actual work—or, it would require bringing in a Hispanic researcher, and the sciences aren't exactly paragons of diversity.
I suppose that the hurdle is set much lower for studying black people—in general, we speak something that is at least mostly intelligible to the average white person.
This is why I doubt that we're going to get anything interesting or usable out of this project: this really feels like someone grasping for low-hanging fruit. Black people are interesting and fun, and writing about them doesn't really require any knowledge, because people will believe pretty much anything you say about them.
There's Really Nothing That Inspires Confidence In This Study
For example, take a look at their description of their subject:
Unlike similarly open-ended groups who identify themselves using a shared hashtag (e.g., #tcot, or “top conservatives on Twitter”), the tweets by those users that make up Black Twitter tend to exhibit more complex rhetorical strategies – such as references to black culture or ways of calling out similarly-identified users – that evade simple mechanical classification.
First off, the first half of that sentence is a complete cop-out. Not all conservatives tag their tweets with #tcot, or #gunsforeveryone, or #keepamericawhite, or whatever tags are popular among that set now. "Conservative" America is just as diverse and confusing as every other population. Just because I don't append a #PSimblack tag onto everything tweet I make doesn't make me any more "complex" than a Tea Party fanatic, or any more difficult to "mechanically classify" than Ann Coulter.
Mega Man 2 is one of the best nintendo games ever #PSimblack
— でじことdex digital (@dexdigi) September 4, 2014
And really, I don't believe that there's anything unique about the slang in Black Twitter that we don't see in any other online forum or community. If you don't believe me, go spend an hour on 4chan and see how much you understand. Then come back a few weeks later—anything you thought you knew will be old news and completely unusable.
Which is why this line makes no sense, unless you're racist:
The terminology and humor of Black Twitter evolves rapidly over time, complicating any effort to generate a definitive list of key terms or phrases.
Yeah, no. That's not a black thing, that's the nature of online communities, or any community, period. They develop their own internal logic and jargon, and change rapidly. This is really nothing more than a poorly-hidden desire to describe black people as "weird" and confusing.
Do They Know What They're Doing?
Perhaps worst of all, the press release freely admits that they don't even know what they're studying in the first place:
This case study turns on a tricky classification problem: not everyone who identifies as black is a part of Black Twitter, nor does everyone participating in Black Twitter identify as black.
It's hard to fault them for this. I mean, we've already determined that under certain circumstances, it's nearly impossible to distinguish a black man from a white girl from a Twitter bot via their tweets. Is it safe to trust a small lab at USC to be able to do what tens of thousands of black people couldn't?
And really, in a world where TIME is unironically producing primers on what "bae" means for their clueless white audiences, how are these researchers going to even identify what "black culture" is? Do they know that most of us would rather eat Black Eyed Peas than listen to them? Do they know that Blue Magic is not a kind of eco-friendly witchcraft? Do they know where the club is going on a Tuesday?
But then again, perhaps that's what the lone black researcher is for. She's apparently not allowed to make any PR decisions, but maybe they'll let her identify the black stuff.
Before Web 2.0, The Internet Used to Be a Safe Place From Black People
It was a little like gaming culture is now, in that you didn't have people bothering you about pesky things like rape culture or racism. You could log on, read your news, send some emails, and log off.
But now, it's getting a little harder to completely erase minorities from your online experience. Facebook allows you to delete unsavory acquaintances and tailor your experience, but the Twitter web client shows popular tags on the side, which force you, for a moment, to acknowledge that there is a world outside your bubble, and that some of that world is black.
(But someone will probably make a Chrome Extension for that eventually).
Maybe that's why the press release for the Black Twitter study says that
…newcomers to Twitter are occasionally surprised to find that the system can have a profoundly Black feeling to it.
That is, they imply that the user experiences a kind of fleeting revulsion at being confronted with something online that they have spent most of their time avoiding in real life. It’s annoying, because it assumes that the average Twitter user is uncomfortable with black people. It does a disservice to the millions of Twitter users—black, white, brown, and so on—that don’t consider blackness to be particularly profound, because they actually have black friends.
So Who Is This For?
There are at least three answers to this question, but I'll start with the most pedestrian: this study allows white people to satisfy their curiosity about dark people, while keeping them at a safe distance.
We know, for example, that white people tend not to be friends with anyone other than white people. A full three quarters of white people have no minority friends in their social network. But we also know that white people, like everyone else, love to be entertained by black people. That's why audiences at hip-hop concerts are so overwhelmingly white.
So this study allows people to have a window into black lives, while at the same time not having to actually talk to a black person. Even the researchers can observe black people from the comfort of a computer screen. Information about blackness will then be evaluated, filtered, and selectively curated by a small group of white researchers and presented for the perusal and entertainment of a largely white audience.
(That last sentence, incidentally, is precisely how the music industry works.)
That's where the second answer comes in. Once they've compiled this information, they'll be able to sell it to companies that are interested in making money off of black people (but don't actually want to hire any for their own research department).
Which Brings Us to the Last Answer
I want to point out an alternative target market for this information.
I mean, I get it. Why are people so upset about this study? After all, it's just a study by some clueless researchers, right? What could go wrong?
Well, a lot of things. It's important to remember that people don't fund studies for any old reason.
For example, take this bizarre study in which some researchers at Cornell University used YouTube recordings of mosh pits at metal concerts to make models of what people do in crowds:
Yeah, it's a little quirky, and pretty entertaining. It made for some good headlines a couple years ago. Ostensibly, the practical use of this is to help scientists build safer buildings to allow for movement of people in emergencies. But an alternate use of this data becomes clear in this line from the lab's own page on the project:
…it's not exactly ethical to start a riot for the sake of science, so we're limited to simulating evacuations either with volunteers or on computers.
So yes, this research can be used to help people in panic situations, but it could also be used to develop more sophisticated anti-riot techniques. Take that fact, and then consider that your definition of a "riot'" might well differ from the Ferguson Police Department's definition of a "riot."
This is something that even casual observers have picked up on. As one commenter posted on the above video: "this reminds me of fights at my high school."
Now, consider that the lead of that study graduated from Technion, a university in Israel that both has a formal partnership with Cornell and is heavily involved in the development of military technology. Then recall that the Chief of Police of Ferguson recently went to Israel to learn anti-terror tactics from their military, as did the Chief of Police at Cornell. And that the teargas canisters being used on protesters in Ferguson were the same brand and model as those used by the Israel Defense Force on protesters in Palestine.
Take all that, and then consider that this silly punk rock study might have some very wide and interesting implications. I think you see where I'm going with this.
But Let's Be Realistic For A Moment
Were the results of this study usable in time to develop the bizarre military tactics we saw in Ferguson ? Probably not. (But they might be used next time.) And it wouldn’t be fair to say that the lead researcher, or his students, are bad people, or even that they had protest suppression tactics in mind when they did their experiments.
But what’s important is how this information can be used. Say whatever you like about the government, but the people in D.C. are generally very smart and well-read. If you think that this quaint little moshpit study didn’t make it across someone’s desk at the Pentagon, you’re crazy.
So, I’m not saying that this USC trial could be used to somehow control black people. But then again, if you consider teaching corporations how to influence and harness black people for profit "controlling black people," then, well…yeah, I guess I am saying that.
And if you also consider that every mid-sized police department in America has a task force devoted to monitoring online communities for "criminal activity," and also consider that black people are by default criminals in this country, well: let’s just say that advertisers and casual netizens aren’t going to be the only people interested in the results of this report.
Again: look at the funding. The project notes its "generous support from IBM," which in turn is very proud of its Predictive Crimefighting technology.
Welcome to the digital era. The possibilities are endless.
