Social media platforms offer more than entertainment to indulge in leisure; they also serve as crucial sites for marginalized groups to build and nurture their communities. To explore this sentiment, the current study examined whether and how #BlackintheIvory, a hashtag on Twitter, served as a digital counterpublic aimed at helping Black scholars process encounters with racism in higher education. After conducting a thematic analysis of 1,253 randomly selected tweets, five themes were developed that support this hashtag as a digital counterpublic. Users were sharing helpful resources, amplifying hidden truths about racism, sending messages to and from dominant spheres on the website, expressing intersectional awareness, and using culturally coded communication. These themes suggest that Black users establish online communities that can effectively address racial issues they encounter offline. This research sheds light on the role of online spaces in nurturing and facilitating the political progression of marginalized communities.
Harrison et al. (Mon,) studied this question.