The Unpaid Tweet: Give Black Twitter Influencers Their Flowers and Most Importantly, Their Coin.
About This Project
I love exploring any culture-related topics such as trends and Gen-Z-related news as a beat, and I’ve always loved Twitter and the community there for years. As a Twitter user since 2011, I’ve seen this platform grow in so many ways. In the past year or so, I’ve noticed the emergence and discrediting of Twitter users. Unlike other platforms with a clear “influencer” culture, Twitter influencers are not acknowledged. Twitter is a place where any and everyone can thrive, or can they?
In many ways, people measure online success to income made from it, but Monetization for content has become an issue for a few reasons. On Twitter, for instance, people’s content gets stolen and reposted but there’s no direct recognition and no payment, yet those who steal it and post it on other platforms get those things. Although Twitter announced a subscription model, there’s still not a direct payment model that many say would be more effective, nor are brands reaching out to Twitter influencers.
Twitter is influential in today’s culture especially as it pertains to Gen Z content creators dominating social media. Almost a year after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and increased demand for diversity and transparency, this piece will cover how performative it all was. It goes back to the issue: Black creators don’t get the recognition or the pay that they deserve.
Since the first pass, I have more clarity surrounding the direction of my story and I have more questions to consider when writing and reporting on this piece in the future. I’ve already done most of the reporting and the only thing I need to do is interview more media experts and scholars, which unfortunately I didn’t have time for as of now due to my schedule and other freelance pieces I am working on.
Some further questions I’m considering during future reporting include:
- What is the “big thought” and why now?
- What defines a Twitter influencer?
- What do experts say about this?
- What’s the evolution of Twitter → discuss complexities
- What does viral even mean? → fame vs popularity
- What’s the reputation of Twitter, and why should people even get paid to tweet?
In the very beginning, I was going to focus on Twitter influencers as a whole but quickly realized that a lot of who I follow are Black creators, so this narrowed my pitch to focus on popular Black influencers. The metrics I used to determine a “Twitter influencer” include but not limited to # of followers, # of viral tweets (retweets, likes), engagements with their followers, and influence on other platforms (reposts, article mentions, their own accounts on those platforms). When finding sources, I had people on my list that I wanted to interview but I also did a call out via Twitter to find media experts/scholars/PR.
One thing I noted in my interviews with my sources was the fact that I didn’t wanna push a narrative about Black people constantly being mistreated, but my sources confirmed this to be true and made their own connections to how being Black affects their relationship with social media and how they interact online.
