In Brazil, 54% of the population is black, while 82.2% of congressmen, 90% of CEOs and 84% of journalists are white. In a country that lacks black representation in spaces of power, there is an urgent need for collective action to multiply the spaces occupied by the black community.

Raça Magazine, the largest Afro Culture publication in Brazil, saw an opportunity to take action on social media.

Black Characters is a tool that rethinks the use of Twitter to amplify black voices. Twitter has a limit of 280 characters. But the average number of characters per tweet is 33. That means there are 247 characters left to be occupied by a black voice. People can write their tweets as usual, while the tool completes their text in real time, filling in the unused characters with black voices related to the content being written.

The collaborative tool includes 25 years of Raça Magazine’s publications and allows the black community to co-create the database by including new content.

When a user is writing a tweet, the tool developed with machine learning algorithms finds terms in the text, and relates them to information stored on Raça Magazine's extensive database, to provide strings of raw knowledge about the tweet’s central topic, in real time.

Thanks to the large volume of data available in Raça Magazine's 25 years of monthly publications, the scope and number of black personalities can be easily matched to whatever the user might be tweeting, generating information that has historic relevance, and providing black voices to enrich the core topic of the original tweet.

Respecting Twitter’s 280 character limitation, the tool generates complementing text about black personalities, matching the topic of the tweet and using only the remaining characters. To amplify the conversation, we created a campaign hashtag that boosted the project within the social network, thus inspiring more people to use the tool.

Black Characters were launched on April 4, the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As an ever-evolving collaborative tool, it can exponentially impact audiences as more people start using it on a regular basis.

The content, placed on the space left by unused Twitter characters, includes 25 years of Raça Magainze’s publications, and can also be co-created by the black community.

Black Characters became Raça Magazine's most successful campaign in 25 years, raising brand mentions by 379% on social networks, with 98% positive sentiment. The project engaged opinion leaders and has generated, in its first month, more than 40,000 co-created contents that amplified thousands of black voices.