Black Americans find their voice on Twitter forums

Like most early Twitter users, many young black Americans initially took to microblogging to follow celebrities or send short, quick messages to friends on their phones, but the site has since grown to become an important forum to discuss broad issues around race in America.

Black people constitute 12 percent of the US population but make up 26 percent of Twitter users in the US, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. Black Americans took to Twitter early and fast, for a variety of technological, cultural and historical reasons. Mobile phone technology played a huge role. Smartphone adoption was relatively high among black Americans and with mobile operators offering separate texting and data plans, Twitter quickly became a way to send short, quick messages to friends without incurring texting charges. The style of public dialogue on Twitter, says Omar Wasow, a politics professor at Princeton University and co-founder of Black Planet, a social network, also closely mirrors behavior in traditional black gatherings.