For better or worse, social media has become the way many of us get our news these days. And Twitter is the perfect 140-character platform to accompany our bite-sized 24-hour news cycle. All types of things trend around the world on the social network, and you can count on #BlackTwitter to be among those most popular topics on any given day. But #BlackTwitter isn’t just one hashtag – it is community that drives many of the most popular conversations on the social network, from the frivolous (#RHOA and #LHHATL) to the revolutionary (#Blacklivesmatter and #HandsUpDontShoot.)

Among the top 30 #BlackTwitter moments of 2014, perennial standouts like #wcw and #BETAwards made the list, along with new topics like #RayRice and #YouAintBlackIf. And whether they were our most-loved or most-hated TV shows and movies, we tweeted about ‘Scandal’, ‘Being Mary Jane’, ‘Ride Along,’ and ‘Think Like a Man Too’ more often than any others. Throughout the year, there were a few other moments that had us talking as well.

Back in January, #BlackTwitter lamented what could have been with #ThisCouldBeUsButYouPlayin, which garnered over 250K tweets in a 24-hour period:

 

 

 

 

We’ve probably all forgotten #GhettoJeopardy (perhaps for good reason), which grabbed almost 125K tweets in February:

 

 

 

 

In March, we celebrated Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar win, and her brother made a cameo in the most retweeted tweet of 2014:

 

 

Then in April, all of Twitter reacted to the news of former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s NBA ban with #BannedForLife. Over 1.3 million tweets were sent during the press conference where NBA commissioner Adam Silver made his remarks, with almost 40,000 tweets per minute in the moments directly after the announced ban:

 

 

 

 

 

All hell broke loose in May, when that now-infamous video footage of Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Solange in an elevator hit the internet and went viral. And of course, #BlackTwitter had all sorts of theories about #WhatJayZSaidToSolange, with over 210K mentions:

 

 

 

 

When the horrific Boko Haram kidnappings claimed over 200 Nigerian girls,  the entire world responded with #BringBackOurGirls:

 

 

 

 

 

In November, Kim Kardashian tried to #BreakTheInternet with her Paper magazine cover photo, and with over a half million tweets and counting…

Twitter’s reaction was…predicably mixed:

 

 

 

 

But when Solange showed us how to really ‘break the internet,’ sisters let out a collective “Yasssss” heard all across social media. Her wedding pictures, released exclusively to Vogue, got close to 100K tweets in just one day:

 

 

 

More than anything else though, the events of #Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York will forever dominate what happened on #BlackTwitter this year. When unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson and subsequently portrayed as a violent criminal after his death, #BlackTwitter wondered aloud how we might be perceived in the same situation with #ifTheyGunnedMeDown, which closed in on 300K tweets:

 

 

 

 

 

Worldwide, #BlackLivesMatter and #iCantBreathe trended during the days when two separate grand juries failed to indict officers Darren Wilson for the shooting death of #MikeBrown, or Daniel Pantaleo for the strangulation death of #EricGarner by chokehold. This map shows the flow of the global conversation over time:

 

The return of singer D’Angelo, who just released his first album in 14 years, lifted the spirits of Black folks across the world. #BlackMessiah averaged over 10K tweets per day in the five days following its release on December 15th:

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you to our friends at Twitter for the info. We’re looking forward to seeing what’s trending in 2015!

Follow Tech-Life Expert Stephanie Humphrey on Twitter.