Twitter started a new billboard campaign in June, and here is my piping hot take it took me two weeks to write: It’s fine! Even though I can make a case against it in theory — it’s using the Black Lives Matter movement to promote the platform Donald Trump uses to foment civil war! — it ultimately strikes me as tasteful-ish. The opposite of the Pepsi ad, except the actual opposite of a Pepsi ad wouldn’t be an ad.
It’s a national campaign, and here are some of the billboards:
I made a little list of reasons these billboards don’t feel dark to me in the way branding + activism usually does.
Twitter paid (a lot?) to use the tweets on billboards.
I think Twitter could have technically ducked out of this using Terms of Service something-something, but they didn’t. Hood Feminism authorMikki Kendall, whose tweet is above, said Twitter asked her permission before using her tweet, and paid her a “pretty penny” for it. (Which she donated).
Especially heartening because most, if not all, of the tweets used in the campaign came from Black users, and unpaid creative work from Black Twitter helped make Twitter a billion dollar company. Twitter’s finally, patchily paying back a community it’s been capitalizing on for a decade+! That’s… good? I mean, it’s not structural change, but it’s moving resources around in a way guilty gestures like dropping the “master” from “master bedroom” don’t.
The billboards center the users’ message, not Twitter’s features.
The tweets appear almost exactly the way they do on Twitter, except for the little added bird logo in the top right corner. There’s no extra slogans or calls to action, like “Sign up for Twitter today to join the conversation!” or “Twitter: Not just where the President encourages you to shoot looters and buy weird medication!”
The billboards basically retweet the messages into the physical world. I would say they’re signal-boosting more than they’re co-opting.
The users actually have messages.
Unliked Pepsi’s Black Lives Matter ad, which distorted the movement’s message down to ~“Peace and soda and most of all COPS are fun!”, the billboards amplify the users’ actual messages. They’re not super radical — no defenses of looting; no mentions of police abolition or anti-capitalism — but they’re not hollowed out to the point of blandness. It’s depressing that “Black lives matter” isn’t a bland statement, but if you look in the replies to Twitter’s thread of photos, it really isn’t. (Yet! Yet.) The replies are chaos: “WHITE LIVES MATTER,” transphobia veiled in Bible quotes, weird fetus stuff, ugh.
The messages are earnest.
I love my Twitter irony so much. I check in with ironic strangers every day on Twitter dot com! I cherish Dril and his little thoughts. I love this tweet (though I chose it semi-randomly and now I’m putting a lot of pressure on it):
But this billboard campaign suggests Twitter, the business, is proudest of the earnest tweets on its platform. I like that. The best ironic tweets keep me addicted to the app, but the best earnest tweets make me a better person and help me see my blind spots and, especially in aggregate, really do the Lord’s work. This campaign feels like a nice moment of appreciation for all the people who don’t feign detachment on Twitter and have display names that are like, “Bean Canister.”
This concludes my listicle-format thoughts on why the new Twitter billboards, though they won’t save us or create a positive peace in our troubled nation, are fine. If you don’t think they’re fine, though, reply to this email — I would truly love to hear from you!