From cultural appropriation to commodified trauma, Black creators and consumers of digital media are increasingly forced to confront a variety of unique challenges on social media platforms.'Black Twitter' has had a major impact on pop culture and politics over the past decade. Reports support claims that marketers were underpaying Black influencers on TikTok and other social media platforms, while algorithms seem to favour white creators.
"Whether it was social media, whether it was news media, I just kept noticing the repetition in particular kinds of imagery. And a lot of it was coming from, of course, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter," Gibson, an award-winning poet, toldGibson's experience is part of a larger challenge that Black creators and users face on social media platforms and digital media more broadly."I like engaging with news.
While documentation and archival work is important, she said, what's concerning is when the purpose of the image shifts. "So it's no longer in an academic journal, or it's no longer in a textbook and it has taken on a new life." "To have to live your life daily, anticipating what you may need to record in order to try to survive, or in order to ensure that the truth and the narrative that reflects reality is out there, that is an incredibly heavy burden that Black people are faced with," said Sobande.
This 'woke-washing' is something Gibson memorializes in a 40-page-long poem, which references the black squares that took over Instagram in June 2020, on what was dubbed 'Blackout Tuesday'.