Former Twitter intern, Tristan Walker, told Bloomberg that the platform “should pay attention” to Black Twitter. Research from Pew reveals that 40 percent of black 18-to-29 year olds are active on Twitter, compared to just 28 percent of white Twitter users in the same age bracket. Conversely, just 49 of Twitter’s 3,000 employees are black, according to the company’s EEO report released in 2014.
On Twitter, Thomas goes by the handle @DexDigi (along with a phrase he has translated in Japanese) and has graced his 4,648 followers with over 11,000 tweets. According to the Kalita’s memo, Thomas is from San Bernardino and is a doctoral candidate in East Asian studies at Cornell University. He has taught media studies and Japanese and is writing a book about Japanese hip-hop. He began working in digital media at UC Riverside as a student director of programming at KUCR-FM (88.3), independently producing podcasts, music and news programs. He writes regularly on social justice, Internet and youth culture, and video games.
Other black journalists who donned the title of ‘first to’…include Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first African American female correspondent to receive White House credentials; and Thomas A. Johnson, the first black reporter at Newsday and later, at The New York Times, one of the first black journalists to work as a foreign correspondent for a major daily newspaper.