Black Twitter as “Master” Social Architects: Maintaining Online Community Boundaries Through the Production of Time and Place

This study explores how Black Twitter, an online community of Black users, creates a place for itself online and how the historical positioning of Black populations worldwide informs the users’ placemaking practices. Using an online ethnography and Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, I analyzed how Black Twitter users communicate to create a sense of place on the platform. Findings indicate that Black users experience time on social media in layered ways, such that they blend historical and contemporary cultural experiences to connect with one another and defend against outsiders. Extending previous work that examines Black Twitter as a cultural formation, this study explores two dimensions: (1) how Black users’ temporal practices challenge notions of digital behavior that reduce user agency and (2) how users perform boundary work by using the platform to defend themselves from outside influences. For example, #YourSlipisShowing enabled Black users to call attention to accounts posing as Black users, effectively turning a platform feature into a defense method. In addition, Black users often call on their collective memory to identify community members through shared cultural experiences and emotional connection. In some ways, Twitter supports the process of collective memory (re)production and engagement through platform features, such as retweets and non-chronological timelines. These observations offer additional frameworks for analyzing community maintenance and agency within hostile digital spaces.