A few people have commented about how my story disproportionately highlights white people. It’s a valid critique that I’ve thought a lot about, so I wanted to address it. For those who don’t know, I wasn’t paid to write this and didn’t think it would get this much attention as a blog article. Had the draft been picked up by a publication, I would’ve done more research during editing, which would have led to auditing for diversity (among other things). I went into writing it based on what I knew of this subculture and the majority of people included I consider friends.
I’ve since checked the story for diversity and found that 3/7 interviews I conducted were with POC. I also found that 12 men, 12 women, and 1 non-binary person were pictured in the thumbnail, 9 men’s tweets, 9 women’s tweets, and 1 non-binary person’s tweets were embedded in the article, and the article itself mentioned 10 men, 9 women, and 1 non-binary person. Included among these were also 3 gay men and 1 bisexual woman (that I’m aware of). All that said, the critique in question is the total number of POC included, and they are underrepresented. 5/24 people in thumbnail are POC, 5/19 of the embedded tweets are POC, and 7/30 of the total people mentioned in the article are POC. I haven’t looked into the demographic breakdown of twitter to calculate equitable representation, but in my (limited) experience navigating this specific subculture, I have found it to be majority white (which could easily be a product of myself being white). If that’s accurate, one speculation on why is that most “Local Twitter” users are white college age kids who reward normie/relatable/bare minimum content. But no matter how the demographics break down, I’m sure the POC included are still disproportionately underrepresented, so I apologize and will be more diligent in future publishing.
Since publishing, some users have recommended POC personalities to me, but most had under 10k followers or came from other backgrounds besides twitter (e.g. @shutyourhell who got her start from Tumblr where she had 600,000 followers as thebootydiaries). Virtually everyone I highlighted in this article has at least 60k+ followers if not 100,000’s, and they all started their digital brands on twitter, unless specified otherwise (like Sarah Schauer starting on Vine). This isn’t to demean personalities with less followers, just to reiterate that (1) they don’t have the same influence and (2) they’re harder to find. I’m always looking to diversify the people I follow and support, so recommendations are always welcome.
Three final notes — (1) I did reach out to several more people for interviews and permission to embed their tweets who I never heard back from, which goes back to accessibility and another reason most of the personalities included are people I know. (2) The article is about public twitter personalities, not just funny twitter accounts. There are thousands of entertaining twitter accounts that are anonymous, just post memes, came from other platforms, etc., that fit into different subcultures than the one written about here. (3) Anyone else is free to write about this subculture the way they see it. I’m not its sole narrator. However, I do take responsible platforming seriously and care about minority representation, so I will do better research in the future, even if it’s a story I’m publishing without pay.
Here’s a list of personalities to follow who were recommended to me, didn’t make the final cut, or fit just outside the subculture from this article:
POC TWITTER PERSONALITIES:
@jaboukie
@icedoutomnitrix
@ilovesmokingmid
@inclhmptn
@almondtiddies
@arayyay
@ayoedebiri
@EDP445
@bocxtop
@CrypticNoOne
@PeterXinping
@shutyourhell
@matchu_chutrain
@LilNasX
@yaperboi
@yunglame
@HotGamerSex
@guwop
GENERAL TWITTER PERSONALITIES:
@brainwxrms
@BigTucsonDad
@ewdatsGROSS
@Michael1979
@Skoog
@TheAndrewNadeau
@WhaJoTalkinBout
@pant_leg
@kbnoswag
@joeygllghr
@kyleplantemoji
@pienar
@FeelingEuphoric
@FrazzleMyGimp
@blondiewasabi
@ogmaxb
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I appreciate you all for the feedback, critiques, and for reading this story in the first place. I had no idea it would reach this many people who care about creator representation. Amplifying them is so important given the complacent consumer culture and exploitative (and broken) media institutions in place today, so always consider supporting them however you can!
- Nathan
