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.
“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.
“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.
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 embodied.
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.
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 commented that it’s the first sci-fi show “with a black Chosen One and a white Magical Negro.”
“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.
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.
Twitter underwent a noticeable vibe shift 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.”
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.”
Today, some of the biggest cultural voices on X have migrated to Threads—including author Roxane Gay, activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham, and 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.