Inspiring much of the right wing’s campaign against supposed federal government censorship–including the lawsuit in Murthy v. Missouri–has been Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and military contractor.

Black Twitter gave the internet its own language in many ways,” says Parham. “It is in part the slang that we use online,” he adds. “This idea of, you know, shade and calling for receipts. But it’s also meme and GIF culture,

Black users were already disproportionately present in digital spaces in the early 2000s, but Twitter helped those users find each other, especially after the hashtag became a thing in 2007 during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.