Re-imagining Virtual Communities: Ethical Guidelines for Studying Black Twitter

Abstract

Black Twitter is an informal online network of Black users who leverage Twitter to share perspectives, build community, and mobilize around cultural and social justice issues. Black Twitter is a unique socio-cultural space where collective identity, shared experience, and cultural production converge. In this empirical study, we discuss Black Twitter as a virtual community, an online field site shaped by social interaction and platform dynamics, drawing on digital ethnographic methods like participant observation to understand its dynamics and the socio-technical systems that shape it. While existing frameworks and checklists fall short in providing methods for specifically studying virtual communities such as ignoring concerns of extracting data from closed communities and pushing for open access, we introduce an ethics-centered checklist for studying Black Twitter and more generally, marginalized virtual communities by addressing risks such as data misuse, data ownership, and misrepresentation. Applying this checklist, we conduct case studies to: 1) analyze how automatic moderation systems impact Black Twitter users’ experiences and 2) explore in-group agreement on ownership and usage of reclaimed language. We find that moderation systems often misinterpret culturally-specific language and norms around reclaimed terms. To illustrate how users adapt language to circumvent flawed moderation systems, we perform keyword analysis to reveal that character-level perturbations of the communities’ reclaimed slur reduces toxicity scores by 30.7%. Additionally, we conduct a community-sourced survey in which responses show that views on reclaimed slurs vary, with some linking them to the African diaspora and others to Black American identity, underscoring the need for culturally-aware moderation. Ultimately, our checklist offers an actionable framework for researchers to ethically engage with marginalized virtual communities emphasizing cultural nuance, accountability, and self-awareness.