Is Twitter, ostensibly a place where the (online) globe can convene and converse free from the tyranny of distance, actually partitioned along the lines of race? Slate magazine cites the emergence of blacktags – trending topics contributed to almost exclusively by African-Americans that regularly make Twitter’s top 10 trending list. And not only is the twittersphere apparently racially segregated, it seems that black people are actually using the service in a different way – they form tight clusters, follow each other more readily, retweet more often and post more @replies – to the average user, and all this gives them a kind of power bloc status in online conversations. A common feature of blacktags is that they comment on race and stereotypes as well as love and sex – see #ifsantawasblack and #ghettobabynames.

Baratunde Thurston, an Onion editor, says that blacktag conversations are a natural evolution of the tradition of black oral culture and the call-and-response tradition, an earlier emanation of which was the emergency of rap battles and hip hop culture in New York in the 70s and 80s.

African-Americans are over-represented on Twitter in terms of the US population, accounting for a quarter of users. They also have different, more social, follower-following patterns, with more reciprocity (i.e. less celebrity-following) than the average user. It should also be noted that blacktags are generally used by working class teenagers and 20-somethings, and are not broadly inclusive of the black community (and in fact many African-Americans find them somewhat offensive and racist).

Have you noticed blacktags trending on Twitter? Are the people you follow generally from a similar background to you, or do you have a diverse set of followers and followees?

Via MetaFilter & Slate.