Twitter, BET Awards and Racism
Posted by Carmen Dixon on Jun 30th 2009 9:30AM

If you're not Tweeting on Twitter, you're missing out on a valuable, information-packed social media environment.

The people I follow @AllAboutRace Tweet solid information and sometimes moment-by-moment impressions of a particular political or social event, the Presidential debates or, most recently, the BET Awards.

Frankly, the Tweets I saw regarding the BET Awards weighed heavily in my decision to skip the show, and I have no regrets.

However, Black Web 2.0 observes that the presence of so many black folks talking on Twitter at one time made some people extremely uncomfortable and triggered a chorus of racist Tweets.

The BET Awards and the celebrities who attended were among the most popular topics on the micro-blogging site on Sunday. ...

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It seems like whenever African American topics dominate media, there are always some unhappy campers. Social media is no different. Within hours it spawned a site on Tumblr, OMGBlackPeople.Tumblr.com. Tumblr has taken down the site since last night (but here's a cached version of it), and the Twitter account @omgblackpeople is still alive and kicking.

Apparently a lot of people on Twitter wanted trending topics to go back to what they were used to seeing. Here's a smidgen of what was on the site.


Source: BET Awards Dominate Twitter, Causes Racist Backlash, Black Web 2.0

Tumblr later pulled the OMGBlackPeople.Tumblr.com. account because it's content was deemed "hate speech."

This exchange raises an important question, one that we deal with here at Black Voices all the time. Should comments, even hateful ones, be edited or should expression be left alone, even if it becomes a hate-filled free-for-all?

JasonWill1980 said:

Thanks for the info. It's good to see that these serious subjects are being discussed on Twitter. I don't tweet myself because i feel overwhelmed by all the types of media which have been
launched on the net (blogspot/facebook/myspace/etc...), and after busy workdays i don't always have the enthusiasm to go skim through numbers of pages with discussions, but that's me lol.
I'm getting a good portion of info on this site as well. You might also get interesting feedback if you post your story in the Politics & Religion-section from the Org.
Good luck & tweet on !
[Edited 7/1/09 13:18pm]

I got a Twitter account but I haven't obsessively twittered but that's interesting, lol.

Timmy84 said:

I have one but actually never used it

Shango said:

That being said I still don't get the buzz about it. But I'm not surprised of the news.

Hell I don't like the BET telecast anyway and I'm black. If it's backlash, then don't put us all into it claiming we supported it. I'll probably tweet "I haven't support BET in years".

lolz