Black Twitter Is Thriving—on Threads

“黑人推特”正在蓬勃发展——在 Threads 上

Last week, after a Mississippi grand jury declined to bring criminal charges in the death of Nolan Wells, the 18-year-old Black college student who disappeared on Horn Island while traveling with a group of white friends and was later found dead, Black users on Threads demanded justice. 上周，密西西比州的一个大陪审团决定不对 18 岁黑人大学生诺兰·威尔斯（Nolan Wells）的死亡提起刑事指控。威尔斯在与一群白人朋友前往霍恩岛旅行时失踪，随后被发现死亡。此消息一出，Threads 上的黑人用户纷纷要求伸张正义。

“Just so it’s abundantly clear: The state of Mississippi is covering up the murder of Nolan Wells,” user @_taexoxo posted two days after the September 21 decision. The case has incited racial tensions nationwide. “必须明确一点：密西西比州正在掩盖诺兰·威尔斯被谋杀的真相，”用户 @_taexoxo 在 9 月 21 日裁决两天后发帖称。此案已在全国范围内引发了种族紧张局势。

“This year a grand jury handed down an indictment for a pool of water turning green, but didn’t indict when a black kid was found floating face down in water!” commented comedian D.L. Hughley. “今年，大陪审团竟然因为一池水变绿而发布了起诉书，但当一个黑人孩子被发现脸朝下漂浮在水中时，他们却不予起诉！”喜剧演员 D.L. 休利（D.L. Hughley）评论道。

Black Americans have never shied away from calling out America’s racial hypocrisies—Twitter served as an indispensable tool as the Black Lives Matter movement swelled in the 2020s—but the chatter on Threads was uniquely charged for Wells. It was the latest bit of evidence showing that the platform has emerged as a vital artery of the Black social media ecosystem, at times even rivaling the influence Black Twitter once personified. 美国黑人从未回避过揭露美国的种族虚伪——在 2020 年代“黑人的命也是命”（Black Lives Matter）运动高涨时，Twitter 曾是不可或缺的工具——但 Threads 上关于威尔斯案的讨论显得格外激烈。这再次证明，该平台已成为黑人社交媒体生态系统的重要动脉，有时甚至能与曾经的“黑人推特”所代表的影响力相媲美。

In 2021, when I first explored the cultural expansiveness of Black Twitter, I wrote that it was “all the things: news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one.” Five years later, Threads is proving to be its spiritual successor, a robust digital universe where no conversation, no matter how ugly or awkward, is off limits. 2021 年，当我首次探索“黑人推特”的文化广度时，我写道它“包罗万象：新闻与分析、呼吁与响应、法官与陪审团——它既是喜剧秀场，也是心理治疗室，还是家庭聚餐。”五年后，Threads 正在证明自己是它的精神继承者，这是一个强大的数字宇宙，在这里，任何对话——无论多么丑陋或尴尬——都不会被禁止。

As with Black Twitter, on Threads you are just as likely to come across conversations around the ageism double standard that Black women face as you are off-the-cuff TV commentary. Speaking of HBO Max’s new superhero thriller, Lanterns, one user recently quipped that it’s the first sci-fi show “with a black Chosen One and a white Magical Negro.” 正如在“黑人推特”上一样，在 Threads 上，你既能看到关于黑人女性所面临的年龄歧视双重标准的讨论，也能看到随性的电视评论。谈到 HBO Max 的新超级英雄惊悚剧《绿灯侠》（Lanterns），一位用户最近打趣说，这是第一部“拥有黑人‘天选之子’和白人‘神奇黑人’（Magical Negro）角色的科幻剧。”

“The heyday of Twitter was during the Obama era. Now we’re living through the second Trump administration. Having a place to laugh to keep from crying is just as important as it ever was,” Jamilah Lemieux, a cultural critic and author who has 208,000 followers on the Meta-run platform, tells WIRED. “Twitter 的全盛时期是在奥巴马时代。现在我们正经历特朗普的第二个任期。拥有一个能让我们笑出声来而不至于哭泣的地方，依然和过去一样重要，”文化评论家、作家贾米拉·勒米厄（Jamilah Lemieux）告诉《连线》（WIRED），她在 Meta 旗下的这个平台上拥有 20.8 万名粉丝。

Lemieux was active on Twitter for over a decade, where she discussed motherhood and women’s rights, but started to pull back because the level of harassment and vitriol she was getting started to outweigh her positive interactions. 勒米厄在 Twitter 上活跃了十多年，讨论过母职和女性权利等话题，但她开始退缩，因为她所遭受的骚扰和谩骂已经超过了积极的互动。

Twitter entered a new era, with a pointedly different vibe, in 2022 after Elon Musk bought the platform and renamed it X. For day-one users, the app was less functional: It was harder to see the content you wanted, hate speech and propaganda accounts surged, and moderation seemed to disappear overnight. “I’m not surprised that that happened. It was a very deliberate shift away from the progressive Black voices that had defined the platform for its earlier history,” says Lemieux, who describes the current experience of posting on X as “screaming into the void.” 2022 年，埃隆·马斯克收购该平台并将其更名为 X 后，Twitter 进入了一个氛围截然不同的新时代。对于老用户来说，这款应用的功能变差了：更难看到自己想看的内容，仇恨言论和宣传账号激增，内容审核似乎在一夜之间消失了。“我对此并不感到惊讶。这是一种非常刻意的转变，旨在排斥那些在平台早期历史上定义了它的进步黑人声音，”勒米厄说。她将目前在 X 上发帖的体验描述为“对着虚空尖叫”。

Lemieux has since decamped to Threads, where she has become a power user of sorts, riffing on everything from singer Chris Brown to public versus private education. “I wanted a social media home again, but I just wasn’t really sure where I fit. I have always preferred text to video in terms of the creation. And Threads offered what I loved about Twitter, which is that I could reach people with my words without having to curate visuals.” 此后，勒米厄转战 Threads，并成为了一名资深用户，从歌手克里斯·布朗（Chris Brown）到公立与私立教育的对比，她什么都聊。“我想要一个社交媒体的新家，但我不太确定自己适合哪里。在创作方面，我一直更喜欢文字而不是视频。Threads 提供了我所钟爱的 Twitter 特质，即我可以用文字触达他人，而无需精心策划视觉内容。”

Today, some of the biggest cultural voices on X have migrated to Threads—from author Roxane Gay and activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose recent New York Times Magazine essay about her decision to enroll her daughter in low-performing, predominantly Black public schools sparked an intense debate online around using your child to fight systemic failures. 如今，X 上一些最具影响力的文化声音已经迁移到了 Threads——从作家罗克珊·盖伊（Roxane Gay）和活动家布列塔尼·帕克内特·坎宁安（Brittany Packnett Cunningham），到记者妮可·汉娜-琼斯（Nikole Hannah-Jones）。后者最近在《纽约时报杂志》上发表了一篇文章，讲述了她决定让女儿就读于表现不佳、以黑人为主的公立学校，这在网上引发了关于“利用孩子来对抗系统性失败”的激烈辩论。

“omg the threads convo about that article is better because NHJ is on there replying to ppl, god all the employed ppl really did go to threads,” TV writer @theashleyray posted on X, telling another user, “black twitter is there.” “天哪，Threads 上关于那篇文章的讨论更好，因为 NHJ（妮可·汉娜-琼斯）在那里回复大家。天啊，所有有正经工作的人真的都去 Threads 了，”电视编剧 @theashleyray 在 X 上发帖说，并告诉另一位用户：“黑人推特就在那里。”

Bluesky, which launched as invite-only in 2023 before opening up to the wider public a year later, initially announced itself as one of the first serious alternatives to X. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential win that millions of users, seemingly in need of a public sphere free of the MAGA-fueled rhetoric that had overtaken the platform, flocked to Bluesky. They were eager to recapture the spirit of social media’s prime years. Bluesky 于 2023 年以邀请制形式推出，一年后向公众开放。它最初宣称自己是 X 的首批严肃替代品之一。但直到唐纳德·特朗普赢得 2024 年总统大选后，数百万用户才涌向 Bluesky，他们似乎急需一个不受 MAGA（让美国再次伟大）言论影响的公共领域。他们渴望重拾社交媒体黄金时代的精神。

Emboldened by its decentralized format and the promise of improved user safety mechanisms, Rudy Fraser, a developer with a background in community organizing, created Blacksky, a custom feed and moderation service that quickly became a central meeting ground for many Black users on the platform. It has proven to be a more secure social ecosystem for Black users, but it hasn’t exactly swayed public discourse in the way Black Twitter did with #OscarsSoWhite or #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. 受其去中心化格式和改进用户安全机制的承诺所鼓舞，拥有社区组织背景的开发者鲁迪·弗雷泽（Rudy Fraser）创建了 Blacksky。这是一个自定义信息流和审核服务，很快成为了该平台上许多黑人用户的中心聚集地。事实证明，它为黑人用户提供了一个更安全的社交生态系统，但它并没有像“黑人推特”通过 #OscarsSoWhite（奥斯卡太白了）或 #IfTheyGunnedMeDown（如果他们枪杀了我）那样真正左右公共舆论。

Part of that is a numbers game, says Rianna Walcott, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Maryland who founded the Black Digital Migration Project, a research initiative examining how Black social media users respond to changing platform conditions. 马里兰大学传播学助理教授里安娜·沃尔科特（Rianna Walcott）表示，部分原因是用户数量的问题。她创立了“黑人数字迁移项目”（Black Digital Migration Project），这是一个旨在研究黑人社交媒体用户如何应对不断变化的平台环境的研究计划。

“The problems of platform fatigue and reaching a globally Black audience are probably limiting Blacksky’s visibility, as it lacks the initial buy-in that comes from an already connected platform ecosystem like Meta’s,” Walcott says. In the beginning, Bluesky’s biggest user base was concentrated among progressives, particularly journalists, academics, activists, and writers. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 69 percent of respondents who were left-leaning news influencers joined the platform during its first year. And while Blacksky was fundamental to the platform’s nascent growth, Black engagement has stalled for a number of reasons; several colleagues and friends of mine stopped using it after the first few months, s “平台疲劳以及触达全球黑人受众的问题可能限制了 Blacksky 的可见度，因为它缺乏像 Meta 那样已经连接好的平台生态系统所带来的初始用户基础，”沃尔科特说。起初，Bluesky 的最大用户群集中在进步派人士中，特别是记者、学者、活动家和作家。皮尤研究中心 2025 年的一项调查发现，69% 的左倾新闻影响者在平台推出的第一年就加入了。虽然 Blacksky 对该平台的初期增长至关重要，但由于多种原因，黑人的参与度已经停滞；我的几位同事和朋友在最初几个月后就停止使用了，s