Black Twitter: A People's History

Director Penny and his team skillfully blend dozens of interviews with a treasure trove of archival footage and some perfectly placed clips from TV shows and movies to create a fascinating document of Black Twitter.

Black Twitter: A People’s History is a fun and informative document of a phenomenon that is endemic to this particular era of social media discourse, but also helped change the discourse that was happening in general culture.

Stuffed full of interesting anecdotes, including the birth of the phrase #BlackGirlMagic, the most compelling components of the series occur here [in the first hour].

It’s an engagingly specific snapshot of the Twitter era and the social period it overlapped with: a time that was serious even when it was silly, that was fun until it wasn’t.

Black Twitter might be too broad, too brief, too early to serve as the definitive account of this movement. But it’s a compelling first chapter in what’s sure to be a long and lively conversation.

If the viewer is a young Black kid who didn’t know of Twitter until its current X-era, the doc functions as a surface-level crash course. But the movement deserves more than a superficial appreciation.