'There's More Black People Over There': False Equivalences in Platform Distribution and Gimmicks of Platform Capitalism

A point that might be one of grievance of a lost space never truly owned by Black people but still run by it tends to pop up on my "Following" feed on Bluesky once a month. I don't see such conversations on places like Threads — it's really an insular space of "you see what the algorithm determines worthy of attention". It comes from a variation of folks but routinely from folks who seem to long for a space that no longer exists. Yes - Twitter, now X - the company still exists, but there's a heavily undocumented^[1] shift in the entity that was once Black Twitter and how the next option for many was the once-dubbed P92 project, known as Threads to many today. A friend and expert, Dr. Meredith Clark, notes when speaking to the University of Virginia, defined Black Twitter as:

a network of culturally connected communicators using the platform to draw attention to issues of concern to [B]lack communities. It’s the culture that we grew up with. It’s the culture that we experienced in our lives and school, in the workplace, with entertainment – and you see conversations coalesce around specific cultural moments. I always explain to people that Black Twitter doesn’t have a gateway, a secret knock. It’s not a separate platform. It’s all in the way that people use the platform to draw attention to issues of concern to black communities.

This is why, despite using the ethnic marker most commonly used for African Americans, it's able to hold folks from the Caribbean, South America and Europe — although due to the name of the label, African American culture (and those geographically closer to it) are more represented in it. In a beautiful way, Black Twitter was a way for young and old African Americans to communicate with one another in real time in public without explicit oversight or control by school boards, the FCC, Hollywood and what have you. Ironically, events on Black Twitter have managed to transcend the space from which they began themselves - like the Temecula incident or the indie film that introduced Taylour Paige to us, Zola. This is backed by the research done by Pew that showed Black users to be more active on these platforms than other demographics.

I can continue to repeat the academic research that's been put into understanding Twitter as a concept when it came to Black people and I'll list some here:

• Dr. Andre Brock's: "From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation"
• "Distributed Blackness" by the same author, formative in shaping Blacksky
• Laur M. Jackson on The Blackness of Meme Movement
• Evette Dionne on In Memoriam of Black Twitter
• Dr. Meredith Clark on "We Tried To Tell Y'all" and her seminal essay, To Tweet Our Own Cause: A Mixed-Methods Study of the Online Phenomenon "Black Twitter"

I'm not expecting everyone to know of all of the works above — I work on social media technologies and have been in rooms on behalf of sections of Black Twitter — a burden and privilege that carries a weight in how the technologies we use to connect and relate are shaped. But by engaging in these institutions with these titles - it becomes a problem of phrasing and context when folks choose to bemoan the presence of Black people on the platform.

'It's The Truth: There's More Black People At...'

To use a computational metaphor — if there's 1,000 people in room A and 100 of them are Black and in room B, there's 200 people and 10 of them are also Black; by numbers — there are more Black people in room A than they are in room B. Using statistical language, this is a "raw count of absolute frequencies". It's also very apparent in a homogenized ecosystem. Bluesky PBLLC took a different approach in their invention of the AT Protocol that gave way to Blacksky. Despite running in a way that can make the word "distributed" in Brock's book more computationally sound, Bluesky dwarfs the number of users that Blacksky has on a rate of nearly 7,000 to 1. Blacksky manages to deter this by implementing a feed that prioritizes folks who explicitly opt-in to being in Blacksky, the flagship feed of https://blacksky.community/, by using #AddToBlacksky. There's about 14,300 people who liked this feed (a soft indicator of use). These numbers are going to seem small to accounts who have thousands of followers in the Bluesky ecosystem, a feat given that it reports about a million active users daily of their ~44 million users.

This equivalency is needed because it shows that despite the four-odd years in Bluesky's (and less in Blacksky's case) existence, they've managed to develop an organic audience without advertising or algorithmic engagement boosting — things that Facebook and Twitter have both used in ways to increase their profits (with limited revenue sharing to the creators who power their platform and the journalists who live on there).

So yes, there's more Black people on the mega-platform owned by Facebook that's 20 years old than there is on Bluesky - in a similar way that Brazil holds more Black people than the United States by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. That statement by itself will seem confusing, given that African Americans are more likely to have a higher quality of life (in terms of avoidance of racial oppression, political representation and mobility, access to education and what have you) but that occurs when historical, economic and cultural context is stripped from a perspective.

Going Where the People Are

As with the difficulty of describing all of those of African ancestry in the United States (partially or otherwise) under a singular umbrella term, the want to describe (enforce?) a (non-)consensual understanding of Blackness on a sub-section of the Internet as this singular entity, one as neatly described as "Black Twitter", has been a desire of folks whose role in the media production functions of society have left them currently without a faucet to tap on when they want to know "what's going on" ever since Twitter's sale to Elon. Threads has benefited from a large density of Black people on the platform automatically having accounts by way of Instagram^[2] - a digital equivalent to the benefit that the United States had on its cultural outputs due to its capture of African people from centuries ago and their persistent grasp on preventing a means of legitimate exit (if not disassociation).

It's interesting, though. As much as it's spoken about — we don't see other places having issues like this. Smaller ones, in comparison to places like Threads or Blacksky, don't seem to have this problem. It could be due to the fact that they didn't branch off from other spaces. The most prominent one that I pay attention to is Spill. They managed to secure funds in venture capital of $2 million from Kerry Washington]23 in 2024. Ironically, they're part of the inspiration of my idea of Spadat for AT Protocol. But they're not honest about how they make money literally off their analysis of the slice of digital Black experiences — not to their users, nor do these people who pay the executives get paid out for this, being able to pay back Kerry $0.50 to the dollar of her investment (if they paid it out quick):

According to Spill’s chief growth officer, Kenya Parham, the company projected it would cross $1 million in annualized revenue at the start of 2025 and had surpassed that mark by the end of the third quarter of 2025.

I bring this up mainly because there's a similar objective from folks who "want to be where the Black people are" but ignore any formation of such (or use the topic of it as material on other platforms). It's not really about building communities but more about looking for ways to juice engagement back into things that they own and run. We've seen it with Buzzfeed and Worldstar and now Facebook (and Tiktok) has brought the bar down so low for this type of engagement farming, there's a genre of folks who feel entitled to it.

For example, Spill doesn't work with local organizations when they run their conversations about sexual health. Instead, they feed this AI-driven analysis (as paid market research) to large pharmaceutical companies (who can then tailor those ads you see outside of their platform to be more "culturally relevant" or make marketing material more targeted):

Spill’s approach matters only if marketers can translate it into campaigns that meet their objectives. One of the clearest examples so far is its work with Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company that develops and commercializes medicine.

The pharmaceutical company partnered with Spill to change how Black and Brown communities talk about sexual health and pre‑exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The goal is to move the conversation beyond narrow associations and to include, for instance, cisgender Black women, who are often left out of HIV prevention messaging.

There's quite a few groups doing this type of research - to a smaller scale since they're locally focused and aren't incentivized by profit to exist - especially in the Black South - that would have benefited from this kind of research. But instead of working for Black people (which Spill never claims to do, to be fair), they sell out the curated communities on there to pay back what they owe to the investors who help them justify the platform's existence (this is the myth that Black capitalism sells us - if Black people sell Black people - or their essence thereof - back to the system we exist in, then we will see change).

For those who are "producers of culture" — through news, media and things in between — it's up to you to bring the people who will eventually engage with it. We speak about the "algorithm" as a digital entity that dictates traffic but nothing stops producers from explicitly sharing links — the digital equivalent of the "word of mouth". In fact, this is such a valuable means of traffic that platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn embed Urchin Tracking Module fields and now more evolved single tracking fields to determine who, what, where and from how a link goes from their app to another place. There's no reason why those who produce can't leverage this when "shooting into a void" of a new platform to see how people engage — if direct engagement is the goal. What tends to be the want is the platform-specific measurements of engagement, which is also semi-proprietary information (beyond likes, things like Threads' post view count, demographic breakdown of one's race, age and location when viewing your posts) that's marginally useful if you're looking to sell things to people.

Threads for Attention, Spill for Money, Blacksky for ... What?

I write this as the maintainer of the Web experience of the revival of the application that popularized short form video. It's niche in a way — biased leading — in that folks are going to have to work very hard (i.e.: get creative) to try to sell you something. This is increased by the fact that we don't have advertisement-driven feeds, like Threads or Spill, nor do we have explicit chronological sorting of feeds (sans on profile pages), like you'd see on Bluesky. It's also all open source so anyone could (attempt to) fork the code and run their own setup. My hope is that with the long term vision of the open social Web, communities of color, nominally Black ones, can actually use technology in a way that redirects power back to people.

So far, I think it's still early enough such that a perspective is to be seen as non-tangible and only as idealistic. The notions of Black capitalism reinforce the stances of metric-based community building (which discouraged folks from working together) and instead focus on more negative-leading forms of community building (by way of dunking and dragging). I think Blacksky provides an opportunity for Black creators to do something different and to actually live to the values of autonomy that the creator economy likes to parade but without having to commit to the NDA-driven culture it demands. This requires investment — as does video editing, essay writing and any sort of work and does not come cheap. But the payout, the investment will be generative enough to make the effort spent seem insignificant.

I imagine that Blacksky will be a frontier space in how one aims to build an organic audience around things that they share. They (members of Blacksky's PDS namely) have the advantage of not being restricted to solely the Twitter-like experience of Bluesky: they can lean on long-form publishing (for a Medium-like experience) and eventually video (short- and long-form for a TikTok and YouTube-like experience), making their engagement signals way more accurate, authentic and transparent than what can be provided by Google or Facebook — for free. The benefits for research in digital spaces is huge but also can allow for better guardrails around interaction - my mind is jumping in so many directions thinking about what levers we can enable here. I just hope that folks have and move with stances that are just as generative and look for Black people online to build community with, not just to make money off of them.