Black Characters is relevant for Creative Data because it generates co-created content on Twitter to amplify black community voices, using first-party data to build a community of shared stories.

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, found an opportunity to take action on social media.

Black Characters is a tool that rethinks the use of Twitter in order to amplify black voices. Tweets have a limit of 280 characters, but the average number of actual characters per tweet is 33. That means 247 characters are available to be occupied.

Through the website or a plug-in, people can write their tweet as usual, while the tool fills in the unused characters with text promoting black voices. The algorithm always finds references related to the content that's being written. If the topic is politics, the unused characters will be filled in with content from black politicians. If it's art, black artists. The economy, black economists. And so on.

The ever-evolving 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.

The difficulty blacks face in entering prominent spaces and being part of the mainstream media culture in a country where they are the majority – but not the loudest voice –, was the epicenter that led us to connect with the largest black content magazine in Brazil, assisting them in this effort to highlight and amplify black voices that had been stored in Raça Magazine's extensive database over 25 years.

The creative output in this project was enhanced by using an algorithm that searches the database for articles previously categorized by topic, and provides a string of text about a black personality to fill the remaining characters in the user’s tweet. The original text is thus enriched, and these hidden voices are put into evidence, providing people with relevant information that has been ignored for so long.

Black Characters became Raça Magazine's most successful campaign in 25 years. It generated over 40,000 tweets and amplified more than 13,000 black voices in the first month of the campaign alone. It also raised brand mentions by 379% on social networks, with 98% positive sentiment.