Facebook as an Accidental Archive of Black Life
Owning the Story, Losing the Keys
History sometimes arrives disguised as a PayPal notification.
Today, an email popped up in my inbox: “Facebook has sent you $9.89 USD.” That’s about the price of a mocha and a cheese croissant in Chicago.
I stared at it, puzzled. Why was Meta paying me? What had I signed away that I wasn’t aware of in my user agreement? That single coffee-and-pastry sum led me down a rabbit hole of questions about intellectual property, ownership, and control. And what I found was bigger than a stray PayPal payment.
Without intending to, Facebook has become one of the largest living archives of Black life and community history — a corporate platform that profits from our content but also inadvertently preserves our families, our events, and ultimately, our stories.
This article is my attempt to make sense of that paradox. It's the story of how a $9.89 payment opened up a much larger reflection on power, memory, and the fragile permanence of our histories online.
Common Sense, Power, and Control
The irony is sharp. Platforms like Facebook often tell us their rules are just “common sense.” But as we know, “common sense” is rarely neutral; it’s the ruling class’s shorthand for maintaining power. Still, while Meta monetizes every post, photo, and caption, Black communities have used these same spaces to push back against erasure. What corporations see as engagement, we know as testimony.
The Everyday as History
Every tagged photo, livestreamed protest, birthday tribute, or family reunion snapshot becomes part of a broader chronicle. Unlike the archives of newspapers or universities—where Black lives were often excluded or misrepresented—these feeds tell stories from the inside out. They record not just the headline moments, but the textures of daily life: the cookouts, the obituaries, the church services, the block parties, the marches.
Collective Memory by Accident
This wasn’t the plan. Facebook’s infrastructure exists to generate advertising dollars, not preserve cultural memory. But the accident of scale has transformed it into a massive repository. The very things Meta benefits from—our content, our connections, our histories—also serve us in ways we could not have imagined: by ensuring that Black lives and Black stories circulate globally, and often permanently.
“Facebook profits from our lives, but it also preserves them.”
A Double-Edged License
Yes, we maintain IP rights to our content. But the license we grant Meta allows them to use it freely across their ecosystem. That tension is real: we give, they profit. Yet what slips through this exchange is powerful. Even as our posts become data points, they are also acts of self-documentation, small refusals to be forgotten.
Building Legacy in Real Time
For future historians, journalists, or descendants searching for family roots, Facebook is a trove of living memory. It is messy, incomplete, and shaped by algorithms, but it is ours. It holds what was once vulnerable to disappearance: the voices, images, and experiences of everyday Black communities from 2004 onward.
The Fragility of Control
Here’s the paradox: we own the rights, but Meta holds the keys. They can erase accounts, delete images, throttle visibility, or shut the whole platform down. That means what looks like permanence is precarious. Ownership without control is fragile.
We own the story, but they hold the keys.”
Call to Action: Back Up the Archive
If Facebook has become one of the largest Black community archives, then the responsibility is on us to preserve it. We cannot trust that a corporation built on profit will safeguard our memory. That means:
Download your posts and photos. Facebook has a “Download Your Information” tool—use it.
Save family and community albums. Don’t assume they’ll always live on someone’s page.
Create independent repositories. Community archives, museums, and cultural centers can store what platforms might one day erase.
Teach digital self-preservation. Pass on the skills to younger generations so they don’t lose their histories in a server purge.
Our communities built this archive by living out loud online. The least we can do now is secure those stories for the generations coming after us.
Closing Thought
Facebook did not set out to preserve Black history. Yet through our collective posting, sharing, and storytelling, it has become one of the largest archives of Black community life ever assembled. The accident of its existence is also a reminder: our presence is our record, our stories are our testimony, and even in corporate spaces, our histories find ways to endure. The next step is to make sure they survive beyond Facebook’s control.
So knowing what we know, the next step is to be proactive. Facebook profits and preserves, and if we own the story but they hold the keys, then our task is clear: reclaim what is ours, secure what we’ve built, and carry our histories beyond the reach of their control.
Suggested References
Periodical & News Articles
• Isaac, Mike. “Facebook Settles Privacy Lawsuit for $650 Million.” The New York Times, February 26, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/technology/facebook-illinois-lawsuit-settlement.html.
• Kang, Cecilia. “Facebook Has Been a Giant Archive of Humanity. But at What Cost?” The New York Times, June 15, 2020.
• Hill, Kashmir. “How Facebook Became an Accidental Archive of Black Lives Lost.” The New Yorker, July 12, 2021.
• Scott, Eugene. “Black Social Media Users Say Platforms Archive Their Lives but Erase Their Voices.” Washington Post, August 3, 2019.
• Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17, no. 2 (2011): 139–158.
⸻
Books & Academic Sources
• Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
• Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
• Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• boyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
• Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
• Jenkins, Henry, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd. Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
⸻
Reports & Online Resources
• Meta Platforms, Inc. “Terms of Service.” Updated January 4, 2022. https://www.facebook.com/terms.php.
• Pew Research Center. “Social Media Use in 2021.” April 7, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/.
• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). “Archiving the Black Web: Community Memory in the Digital Age.” Accessed August 2025. https://dp.la.