Black social media replaced black newspapers as the engine of racial justice visibility

Evidence

Now Black Twitter (thousands of people who tweet regularly about issues of race in the news and popular culture) and Facebook offer alternative sites for the work that black newspapers once provided. Without black social media, the cases of Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander would have never gotten any traction. Martin, for example, was killed on February 26, 2012. Two weeks later, the Sanford police turned over the case to the state. But Zimmerman wasn’t arrested until six weeks after that. It was only after outrage rose on Twitter and Facebook that the story garnered national attention. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 372

Categorization

• QUESTION: This claim that without black social media Trayvon Martin would never have gotten traction is testable — worth checking how the case actually reached national attention versus how Glaude frames the causality.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the ‘value gap’ is surfaced — here social media is the mechanism for exposing black death to a white public; echoes the post-Ferguson Black Lives Matter origin story far beyond this book.