We Tried to Tell Y'All: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics)

Through interviews, news analysis, and personal observation, Meredith D.Clark presents the first book about how Black Twitter users carved out a vital space for fast-paced, incisive commentary on Black life in America not found in the mainstream press.Since 1827, when Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper to be published by free Black men in the United States, Black folks have been making use of the media technologies available to them to tell their own stories in their own ways.In We Tried to Tell Y'all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives, Meredith D.Clark explains how Black social media users subvert the digital divide narrative while confronting centuries of erasure, omission, and mischaracterization of Black life in 'mainstream' media.This ethnographic exploration of Black Twitter draws on news media analysis, in-depth interviews, and personal observation to trace the phenomenon's three levels of community connection, and advances a theory of Black Digital Res