The Black Digital Migration Project
Each year the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) conducts collaborative research projects examining the intersection between Black culture and digital technologies. Dr. Rianna Walcott led 2023’s collaboration on digital Black migration practices. This project investigated what informs Black users’ digital mobility, and particularly their choices to migrate to other social media platforms in response to significant change to their user experience – in this case, in response to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022.
Using the Great Migration as a parallel – when over six millions Black Americans migrated from the South to the North, Midwest, and West as a result of increased racialized hostility and loss of opportunity in the American South – we evaluated similar patterns on Twitter as Black users confronted rising hostility and loss of user functionality by leaving the platform; moving to competitors such as Mastodon, Instagram, or TikTok; or staying on the social networking site and actively confronting the changes made to the platform.
In May 2023, The BCaT Lab was invited to present at the Center for Archival Futures Endeavors (CAFe) Graduate Research Symposium and iLab Mixer at the University of Maryland. Doctoral student and BCaT Fellow Tynesha McCullers and incoming graduate student Andrew Clarence Lowe Mohammed presented “Platform versus the People” about our collaborative project on digital Black migration. We discussed our experiences developing collaborative research, as well as initial exploratory findings such as our co-constructed bank of search terms, timeline of events constructed from media outputs, and some of the progress and struggles we had experienced thus far.
Over a course of biweekly meetings in the BCaT lab, our team developed a novel, manual method of data collection in response to changes in access to Twitter's API, which curtailed access to existing computational approaches such as TAGS and DocNow. Over summer 2023, the Black Digital Migration team met to scrape data, share insights about emerging rival platforms, and discuss updates and shifts in Twitter’s – now “X” – infrastructures and policies. These meetings were crucial for us to make sense of the frequent changes to the platform that presented challenges to both our research project and our personal usage.
During Fall 2023, the BDM research team began moving into the next phase of the project. Here we began reviewing and ‘cleaning’ the dataset we collected over the summer, and recorded a podcast episode discussing the research project. In Spring 2024 the Black Digital Migration (BDM) collaborative research team continued working diligently, finishing cleaning up our dataset of tweets, and creating visualizations of the data using Tableau.
In February 2024, we traveled to New Orleans, LA for the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference in February hosted by the Department of Communication at Tulane University. BDM Project Lead, Dr. Rianna Walcott, shared her Just Tech paper entitled “#RIPTwitter: The Conditions of Black Social Media Platform Migration” which interrogates the roles platform affordances play in social media users' migratory decisions, and parallels digital migration with historical Black diasporic movement. BCaT Graduate Fellows Andrew Lowe Mohammed, Alisa Hardy and Tynesha McCullers presented “Exploring Black Digital Migration Practices Through Collaborative Research” to explain our initial inquiry, methodological framework, as well as share our project’s current and upcoming outputs.
Using knowledge and experience gained from working on the Black Digital Migration Project, research team member, Tynesha McCullers, served as an expert source for Unraveling Threads: The rise and fall of Meta’s Twitter killer. Featured in NC State University’s Technician, the news piece provided insights into social media users’ excitement and skepticism surrounding Twitter’s new rival platform, Threads.
In March 2024 we launched the Black Digital Migration Project webpage on the BCaT website. This first iteration of the page included our interactive timeline, an infographic describing our research methodology, as well as the Tableau visualizations we developed from the dataset. We also welcomed Dr. Kenton Rambsy, Associate Professor of African-American Literature at the University of Texas-Arlington, to consult on the project and share best practices for data storytelling. The team met 2-3 times a week and conducted cleaning independently for close to a month to ensure the groundwork was laid for our first writing retreat.
During this retreat, which took place over the course of three days, BDM team members came together to write an academic paper, draft a methods paper, finalise the interactive visualizations, and develop a data story in ArcGIS. Our website was updated and designed by our undergraduate intern, Roshida Herelle, to include our newest data visualizations alongside our interactive timeline and research methods.
Recognizing the benefits and challenges of working as part of a hybrid, cross-institutional collaborative research project, we participated in UNC Charlotte’s Virtual Identity, Community, and Entitativity (VICE) Lab’s Project, studying distributed and remote research teams. This experience provided further insight into how our project meetings were shaped by our varied knowledge, research methods, communication styles, and geographical locations.
For the remainder of summer 2024 and throughout the fall 2024 semester, the BDM team worked together to make edits to our methods and theory papers. In October, we drafted an ArcGIS story map, which was then implemented by Roshida Herelle, as an additional research output to view the project findings through ‘scrollytelling’. In June 2025, the BDM team came together for another summer writing retreat to finalize outputs for the collaborative project including our final iteration of the BDM webpage, our ArcGIS story map, as well as our methods and theory papers which are currently accepted pending revisions and in progress, respectively.
