Photographs by Justin Maxon for The Atlantic

This winter, I attended a livestock auction on California’s remote northern coast. Ranchers sat on plywood bleachers warming their hands as the auctioneer mumble-chanted and handlers flushed cows into a viewing paddock one by one. Most of the cows were hale animals, careering in and cantering out. But one little brown cow moved tentatively, rheum slicking her left eye and a denim patch covering her right.

That night, I went to take a closer look at her along with a pair of animal-welfare investigators and some of the traders who had participated in the auction. Cow 13039, as her ear tag identified her, was segregated with other sick or injured cattle in a pen near the viewing paddock. A farmhand led her into a squeeze chute, so that I could see her udders and feel her bony sides and scratch her head.

The denim patch had been glued straight onto her right orbital rim. I helped work up the patch’s edge; when a rancher finally ripped it off, her eyeball swelled from its socket, tethered to her skull by muscle and sinew and skin. Unable to focus, the eye rotated wildly. It had ruptured, its wet inner contents extruding from the broken membrane; blood and green pus suppurated from its edges, smelling of copper and must. The cow had “cancer eye,” the rancher who had purchased her guessed, the most common bovine cancer.

Cow 13039, the auction affidavit showed, came from one of the country’s preeminent dairy farms: Alexandre Family Farm, a nationwide supplier to stores including Whole Foods. Alexandre cows are pasture-raised, and the operation is validated by California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), Certified Humane, and the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Its owners, Blake and Stephanie Alexandre, won the Organic Farmer of the Year award a few years back and have been profiled by The New York Times. For $8, you can buy about a third of a gallon of its top-shelf milk.  

[Annie Lowrey: Radical vegans are trying to change your diet]

The Alexandres sold dozens of grievously ill and injured cows at auction over the past four years, according to a sprawling whistleblower report published by the nonprofit advocacy group Farm Forward. On the farm, the report charges, mismanagement led to “the extreme suffering of hundreds of cows.” One whistleblower contacted the local sheriff and the United States Department of Agriculture, among other organizations, to report animal-welfare violations, but without results. The report is based on hundreds of location- and date-tagged photographs and videos collected over a four-year period by people who worked either with or for Alexandre Family Farm, as well as on affidavits, veterinary reports, and interviews.

(Justin Maxon for The Atlantic)

Alexandre Family Farm really is a family farm, run by the Alexandres and staffed by some of their children, on multiple sites in Del Norte and Humboldt Counties. Blake and Stephanie met while studying at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the early 1980s, and from there built a pasture-raised empire. Alexandre’s 4,500 cows, which give birth to 4,000 calves a year, make it one of the largest organic dairy farms in the country.

In March, I visited the farm to ask the Alexandres about the report. In that conversation, they questioned the motivations of the whistleblowers, speculating that they were disgruntled former employees and associates, and ventured that some of the photographs might have been staged or doctored. They described some of the depicted incidents as false, implausible, or exaggerated, while saying that others were tragedies or accidents to which they had responded with corrective action. “Stuff happens,” Blake told me, as we sat at his kitchen table. “Employees make mistakes. We make mistakes. We try to fix them when we become aware of them.”

Alexandre is not just any farm; it is esteemed by chefs, politicians, and advocates for humane agriculture, and consumers seek out its products. The report implicates not just the farm but also the certification programs that farms like it use to assure consumers that the food they are eating is ethically sourced and cruelty-free. And it implicates the government, which does little to protect the welfare of farm animals. Laws are lax and enforcement is even more lax, despite widespread public support for animal protection.

When I met Cow 13039, a dying animal sold to the highest bidder, I thought that the system had failed her. But in reporting this story, I found something far more disconcerting. No system had failed her, because there was no system to protect her in the first place.

one thing is not in dispute: Alexandre cows live a life far better than those on the mega-operations that produce most of the country’s milk. They eat grass and hay instead of pellets made from corn and soybeans. They have daily access to pasture and live in herds, rather than being isolated in stalls. (Cows are sociable animals—personality-wise, they’re a lot like dogs.)

The promise of happy, healthy cows has fueled the company’s success. The farm won an award from Whole Foods in 2020 and is one of only six Certified Humane bovine-dairy operations in the United States. The Alexandres have become outspoken advocates of back-to-the-earth farming; Blake was appointed to a state agricultural committee and is now on a California regenerative-farming commission.

But many Alexandre cows are neither happy nor healthy, the Farm Forward report concludes. “Most of the whistleblower or undercover investigations that are done on animal farm operations are a couple of videos … maybe one whistleblower coming forward,” Andrew deCoriolis, Farm Forward’s executive director, told me. “The thing that makes this unique is the totality of the evidence.”

[Annie Lowrey: What’s different about the Impossible Burger?]

The details in the report are horrifying: a cow with mastitis having her teat cut off with a knife. A cow sent to auction with a spinal-cord injury that had left her incontinent and partly paralyzed. A live, alert cow being dragged by a skid steer. A cow that could not walk being left in a field for two weeks before being euthanized. Cows sprayed with a caustic combination of mineral oil and diesel fuel to tamp down on a fly infestation (which, a whistleblower says in the report, they were told to lie about to an inspector).

At their farm, in a written response, and in a follow-up conversation, the Alexandres described such incidents as improbable, given the farm’s protocols. “Cutting teats off” has “never been a practice on our dairy farms,” they told me. They said that injured cows received medical treatment and when necessary were moved safely, without dragging. A farm worker had mixed red diesel into a fly spray, they told me, because that made it easier to see where the spray had been applied, and the farm stopped the practice when management learned about it.

Former employees said that sick cows were regularly denied antibiotics for mastitis and hoof infections, at least in part to maintain their milk as organic—a charge corroborated by an Alexandre farm worker not involved in the report. (Once a cow is given antibiotics, her milk must be sold as conventional for the duration of her life.) The farm has “natural” treatments that “allow us to not need synthetic antibiotics,” Vanessa Nunes, Blake and Stephanie’s daughter and a dairy manager at the operation, told me. “We don’t need to give an antibiotic for mastitis. We have a tincture that we’ll use.” (Mastitis can be debilitating when not treated with antibiotics.)

Whistleblowers also said cows with infections had their eyes packed with salt and had denim patches glued to their skulls. The farm responded that cows with pink eye were treated using a saline solution with cod-liver oil, and sometimes with apple cider vinegar. The farm said that the denim patch was a “gold standard” method to cure pink eye.

Jim Reynolds, a large-animal veterinarian, told me that salt would be “horrible” to use in any animal’s eye and that patches had no medical benefit, and could worsen an infection by trapping dirt and irritating the eye. “I don’t know that it’s been recommended since the 1980s,” he said. He told me that the farm’s treatment for eye infections was “nonsense.”   

Dairy cows generally have their horn buds destroyed with a caustic paste or a hot iron in the first weeks of life. But the report describes an incident in which Alexandre let hundreds of calves grow horns and then dehorned them as adults with a sawzall, a handheld construction tool. Horns are innervated, like fingers, not inert, like fingernails; the cows were not given anesthetic. The Alexandres said that the employees cut off only the tips of the cows’ horns, which are not sensitive, to prevent them from injuring people or other animals, and that it was a onetime event.

Left: The auction yard where Alexandre Family Farm cows are sold. Right: Cow 13039, with the denim patch over her eye. (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic; courtesy of the author)

Mismanagement at least once led to mass death, the report charges, when hay deliveries ran late. The whistleblowers said the animals were so famished by the time the feed truck arrived that they stampeded, and many were trampled to death or needed to be euthanized soon after. The Alexandres described this as a “tragic accident” involving 30 cows who were without food for only a few hours after an equipment breakdown; the farm said it had implemented new protocols to prevent anything similar from happening again.

The farm also contested the notion that it would send ailing cows to auction, rather than euthanizing them; the auction facility would not accept such animals, the Alexandres told me, something Leland Mora, the head of the auction house, confirmed. Still, on a random Wednesday, I went to that auction. And I met an Alexandre cow with what looked like metastatic cancer, her eyeball swelling out of her head.

Most American consumers abhor animal cruelty and support laws preventing it. In a recent ASPCA survey, three-quarters or more of respondents said they were concerned about farm-animal welfare and supported a ban on new factory farms. Yet cruelty, even egregious cruelty, against farm animals is often legal, provided that the suffering is “necessary” and “justifiable” by the need for farms to produce food, David Rosengard of the Animal Legal Defense Fund told me.

To determine what is “necessary” and “justifiable,” lawyers and juries often look at what farms are already doing, what agricultural schools are teaching, and what Big Ag publications recommend. In effect, I gathered, animal-welfare law is slanted toward the needs of farms much more than the experience of animals.

Even gratuitously abusive treatment often goes unpunished. Local authorities have jurisdiction over most animal-cruelty complaints. But cows, pigs, and chickens are not great at picking up the telephone to call those authorities. Animal-rights activists are able to perform investigations only sporadically, and at significant legal risk to themselves. Farm workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, rarely report violations.

[Peter Singer: The meat paradox]

Plus, as I learned from speaking with the Alexandres and interviewing the whistleblowers, agricultural communities are tight-knit. The people involved in this story have long, complicated histories with one another—personal grievances, financial entanglements, legal disputes. The whistleblowers declined to be quoted by name, fearing for their livelihoods, save for one, a rancher named Ray Christie, who has bought hundreds if not thousands of Alexandre cattle. In 2009, after a raid, he was put on two-year probation for possessing cockfighting instruments; in 2018, he was charged with felony animal cruelty himself over the state of his cows. (He recently accepted a plea bargain, agreeing to misdemeanor littering charges for improperly disposing of animal carcasses.) Given the personalities involved, I focused on the documentary evidence about the cows themselves.

The condition of some Alexandre cattle spurred one of the whistleblowers to try to get law enforcement involved. In January 2021, the whistleblower told Humboldt County Sheriff William F. Honsal that mistreated Alexandre cattle were being sold at auction, and sent him photos and videos of the cows. The sheriff responded, saying that he would send a deputy to the auction house; the sheriff’s office later referred the whistleblower to animal control. (The sheriff did not respond to requests for comment, and the Alexandres told me they had never been visited by a police officer.)

The whistleblower also attempted to involve a local state veterinarian, Meghan Mott. Mott is a mandated reporter of animal abuse, and frequently attended auctions at the facility I visited. Why hadn’t she intervened? I could not reach her for comment, but Steve Lyle, the director of public affairs at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, told me that the head state veterinarian “tries to convey the idea of ‘if you see something, say something’ to staff.” But he explained that state veterinarians are functionally epidemiologists, checking for conditions like influenza. “If an animal is sick and the cause is not one of the emergency or regulated diseases requiring CDFA action,” care would be the responsibility of the animal’s owner, and negligence the responsibility of law enforcement.

Finally, the whistleblower went to the USDA. The agency has regulatory authority over American farms, but does not perform animal-welfare inspections. “There’s a regulatory system in place to make sure that if we eat a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, we’re not going to get E. coli,” Amanda Hitt, the founder of the Food Integrity Campaign at the Government Accountability Project, told me. “That doesn’t happen in animal welfare.”

That said, the USDA does administer the National Organic Program, which mandates that animals have “sufficient nutrition,” are given “medicines to minimize pain, stress and suffering,” and are “fit for transport” when they are sent to slaughter. But the NOP is mainly aimed at environmental stewardship. Its humane standards are low, and sometimes counterproductive. The program’s restrictions on the use of antibiotics, for instance—intended to prevent farmers from providing the drugs prophylactically, which facilitates overcrowding and contributes to antibiotic resistance—leads farmers to withhold medicine from sick animals, too. That’s particularly cruel for newborns and recently delivered mothers, who are especially vulnerable to infection. (Other countries do things differently: The European Union allows organic dairy cows to get antibiotics up to three times a year.)  

Ag agencies don’t make great cops. The NOP does not audit farms directly, instead relying on third-party certifiers that farms themselves sometimes pick, accommodating widespread fraud. California Certified Organic Farmers performs surprise visits, tests for pesticide residue, does intensive paperwork audits, and sometimes stakes out farms to make sure animals are really living outside, April Vasquez, CCOF’s chief certification officer, told me. But it is also a trade group that promotes organic agriculture and financially supports at-risk farms; its board is made up of organic farmers. Stephanie Alexandre sat on it for years.

The USDA passed the whistleblower’s complaint to the CDFA, which sent a state special investigator to the Alexandre farm sites in May 2023. A USDA document obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the investigation found no wrongdoing. Talking about fraud in the organic program with a USDA officer, the whistleblower became incensed on behalf of the cows and the consumers shelling out for supposedly high-quality products. “You got these single-parent homes, the moms, the young couples, struggling with all the inflation going up,” the whistleblower said. “They’re going to the store, spending their money on this stuff, thinking it’s the best thing for their kids. And it’s all bullshit!”

A compost pile with cow carcasses at Alexandre Family Farm (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic)

The regulatory void around animal welfare has been filled by dedicated nonprofits offering their own certifications for farms meeting high standards. The godparent of this private system is Adele Douglass Jolley, a former employee of the American Humane Association. In 2000, while touring pig farms in the U.K., Jolley learned about the animal-welfare verification program run by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She cashed out her 401(k) to set up a similar program stateside.

Now called Certified Humane, it gives its seal of approval to hundreds of operations caring for 417 million animals in 25 countries. Auditors ensure that farms are meeting its standards, which are set by an independent panel of experts. Farms pay a monthly fee, and they (or the companies packaging the food they produce) get to put the Certified Humane logo on their products—and charge consumers more. But the whistleblower report indicates that Alexandre was far out of compliance. Why hadn’t Certified Humane caught the cruelty?

Perhaps because Alexandre does meet the program’s general standards. Its cows live in herds on pasture; they eat grass and hay; they are not given preventive antibiotics. Perhaps because the private certification system is based on trust and support as much as verification and skepticism. Audits generally happen only once a year, in consultation with the farms in question. Farmers sometimes know their auditors. Producers found to be out of compliance are given a chance to correct the problems.

Certified Humane provided Alexandre with its stamp of approval in early 2021. (Some of the incidents in the whistleblower report predate the farm’s relationship with the nonprofit.) In 2022, Certified Humane received a complaint from one of the whistleblowers about cruelty on the farm. The complainant had taken photographs of two cows they said had eye injuries, Mimi Stein, the group’s executive director, told me in an interview. “These were some very strange pictures,” she told me. “They were not high quality.”

[Read: ‘Plant-based’ has lost all meaning]

When Stein called the Alexandres to ask what had happened, they were “upset” and “passionate,” she told me. They said one cow had had an eye damaged after sale and the other was “fine, as much as anybody could tell.” Stein’s sense was that the Alexandres “would have taken care of them and euthanized them on site” had they been severely injured or ill, as Certified Humane requires.  

The organization followed up with an in-person audit, which found no problems. Basically, Stein told me, “if animals were that damaged, chances are they wouldn’t sell them, because they wouldn’t have any value. It just wouldn’t make any sense.”  

Alexandre also touts its certification from the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which holds farms to even higher animal-welfare standards. Elizabeth Whitlow, its executive director, told me that the incidents and practices depicted in the report would represent gross violations of its rules. But I was surprised to learn that only a small share of Alexandre cows are actually certified by the group.

You couldn’t blame a consumer for being bewildered—about what is going on with Alexandre products or any others bearing a claim about the conditions in which the animals are raised. There are more than a dozen humane certifiers, some with rigorous standards, some that are just industry fronts. “It has this patina of a Yelp review: five stars for this processor!” Hitt, the founder of the Food Integrity Campaign, told me. “This is a certification to make you feel better about eating a certain product. But it has no basis in any kind of reality.”

In addition to certification logos, products feature wholesome-sounding but hard-to-parse terms: free-roaming, naturally grown, ethically raised. For some, such as free-range, the USDA sets a standard and asks companies for evidence of compliance. But enforcement is patchy, and the USDA has in the past accepted applications with little or no substantiation. For others, the USDA sets no standards at all. Food manufacturers know they can charge more for products that consumers think are ethical, Dena Jones, who directs the farmed-animal program at the Animal Welfare Institute, told me. So companies just “start slapping” words and logos on things.

The USDA, to its credit, is tightening up its rules and enforcement. Yet dairy will still “fall through the cracks,” Jones told me. The labels on milk and yogurt are the purview of the Food and Drug Administration, not the USDA. And the FDA holds that it has no role in validating animal-raising claims. As far as the federal government is concerned, when it comes to milk and the cows that produce it, anyone can claim almost anything.

(Justin Maxon for The Atlantic)

The Alexandre farm I toured with the family occupies a damp flat between the Pacific Ocean and an old-growth redwood forest. Hundreds of fat, calm cows chewed emerald grass and slept in the mist alongside a herd of wild elk. Heavily pregnant cows idled in a spacious barn, overseen 24 hours a day by a herdsman. Younger cows rushed up to meet me.

The farm appeared to provide as close to perfect conditions as possible, I thought. Yet dairy is hard—that was something I heard again and again while reporting this piece. On ranches, beef cattle live outdoors, mostly undisturbed, before being moved to feedlots; mothers and calves spend months together. In contrast, dairy cows are repeatedly inseminated or bred, calved, and separated from their babies. They are milked twice a day. And when their bodies begin to give out, they keep getting milked until they are euthanized or slaughtered.

Jorie Chadbourne, a retired brand inspector (a government official who verifies an animal’s ownership at the point of sale or slaughter), told me the Alexandre cows she had encountered over the years were no better or worse than those from other organic farms in the region. But, she added, at auction, organic cows were usually in worse shape than conventional cows, because of the program’s medication restrictions: “It is like an older person, at the end of their life, not having medicine to comfort them or make them well.” (She told me the antibiotic rules are why she raises her own animals conventionally.)

The best certifiers, like Certified Humane, are great at validating farms’ general conditions. But, as Mimi Stein noted, the program certifies the farm—not the animal. Cows get sold off. Cruel incidents happen. And many other certifiers are less rigorous.

[Read: The evidence for a vegan diet]

What is a consumer who wants to support a gentle, green system of agriculture to do? DeCoriolis of Farm Forward had a blunt answer: Give up dairy. “As a consumer, you’re just playing roulette,” he told me. Yet the overwhelming majority of American consumers are unwilling to give up milk or cheese for ethical reasons. What they are willing to do is support stricter rules for agricultural producers and pay more for milk and cheese from farms that treat their animals well. The country is failing to provide those consumers with a reliable and navigable system. That’s a policy problem, and a solvable one.

At a minimum, the USDA should require third-party certification of animal-welfare and animal-raising claims, and apply strict regulations to certifiers: preventing conflicts of interest, requiring surprise inspections, and cracking down on rubber-stamping of industry norms. To meet American consumers’ more ambitious demands, Congress should create a farmed-animal welfare standard and an agency separate from the USDA to enforce it, akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Such changes would improve the welfare of billions of animals in our food system. Yet any changes would be too late for one. In the end, nobody stepped in to aid Cow 13039—not law enforcement, not the state veterinarians, not the auction employees. Alexandre Family Farm gave her vitamins and an eye patch, Nunes told me. They should have sold her sooner, she said. Cow 13039 was ailing. And ailing cows are not worth much.

They are worth something, though. At auction, Cow 13039 got 10 cents a pound. For $119, less auction fees, she spent the final moments of her life not grazing on pasture with her herd but isolated, hungry, terrified, and in pain. Ray Christie’s brother, also a rancher, had purchased her. But she was too sick to have her eye excised. At the slaughterhouse, her carcass would have been condemned.

The morning after I met her, a farmhand shot her between her blighted eyes.

Gisela Salim-Peyer contributed reporting to this story.

Illustrations by Frank Dorrey

A few years ago, Stephanie Williams and her husband fielded a question from their son: How had they met?

So they told him. They’d first encountered each other on a website called BlackPlanet.

To the 5-year-old, the answer seemed fantastical. “He clearly didn’t hear ‘website,’ ” Williams, a writer and comic creator, told me. “He was like, ‘Wait, you all met on Black Planet? Like, there’s a planet that’s full of Black people? Why did you leave?!’ ”

Williams had to explain that they’d actually been right here on “regular Earth.” But in some ways, their son’s wide-eyed response wasn’t so off base: From the perspective of the 2020s, there is something otherworldly about the mid-aughts internet that brought his parents together. In a social-media era dominated by the provocation and vitriol of billionaire-owned mega-platforms, it can be hard to imagine a time when the concept of using the internet to connect with people felt novel, full of possibility—and when a site billed as the homepage of the Black internet had millions of active users.

BlackPlanet went live in 1999, nearly three years before Friendster, four years before MySpace, five years before Facebook, and seven years before Twitter. In those early years, the internet was still seen by many as a giant library—a place where you went to find things out. Sure, the web had chat rooms, bulletin boards, and listservs. But BlackPlanet expanded what it meant to commune—and express oneself—online.

The site offered its users the opportunity to create profiles, join large group conversations about topics such as politics and pop culture, apply to jobs, send instant messages, and, yes, even date. It provided a space for them to hone their voice and find their people. A visit to someone’s customizable BlackPlanet page would probably tell you where they grew up, which musicians they idolized, and what they looked like. “That now seems like the most obvious thing in the world,” Omar Wasow, one of the site’s co-founders, told me, “but at the time reflected a real break from the dominant ideas about how this technology was meant to be used.”

BlackPlanet is often overlooked in mainstream coverage of social-media history. But at its peak, it wasn’t just some niche forum. Despite skepticism within the tech industry that a social-networking site geared toward African Americans could be successful, about 1 million users joined BlackPlanet within a year of its launch. By 2008, it had about 15 million members. The site’s cultural reach extended beyond what numbers can capture: BlackPlanet amplified the work of emerging artists, served as a powerful voter-outreach hub for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, and fostered now-prominent voices in contemporary media. Gene Demby, a co-host of NPR’s Code Switch podcast, told me he joined BlackPlanet while attending a predominantly white college as a way to make connections beyond his campus. “It was sort of like, ‘Give me all the Black people I can find!’ ”

The site and its users helped establish visual-grammar and technical frameworks—such as streaming songs on personal pages and live, one-on-one chatting—that were later widely imitated. BlackPlanet arguably laid the foundation for social media as we know it, including, of course, Black Twitter.

Now, nearly 25 years after its launch, looking back at BlackPlanet’s glory days can be more than just an exercise in nostalgia. Today’s social-media platforms often seem designed to reward the worst in humanity, subjecting their users to rampant hate speech and misinformation. Perhaps by revisiting BlackPlanet and the story of its rise, we can start to envision a different future for the social web—this time, one with the potential to be kinder, less dangerous, and more fun than what the past two decades have given us.

Omar Wasow met Benjamin Sun in the late 1990s, when they were among the few people of color working in New York City’s tech scene. After graduating from Stanford University in 1992, Wasow had moved back to his hometown and started a hyperlocal community hub and internet-service provider, New York Online, which he operated out of his Brooklyn apartment. The service had only about 1,000 users; Wasow made his actual living by building websites for magazines. So he was excited when he met Sun, then the president and CEO of the social-networking firm Community Connect, which in 1997 launched an online forum for Asian Americans called AsianAvenue.

Wasow, the son of a Jewish economist and a Black American educator, had been thinking about how to build community on the internet for years. Like many early tech enthusiasts, he frequented the bulletin-board systems (BBSes) that proliferated in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Spending time on those primarily text-based, hobbyist-run dial-up services helped him anticipate how popular social technologies could be. Many of the BBSes were standard tech-nerd fare—chats where users would discuss pirating software or gossip about buzzy new product releases. But two sites in particular, ECHO (East Coast Hang Out) and the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), modeled a more salonlike online experience that piqued Wasow’s interest. He realized that people didn’t necessarily want the internet to be just an information superhighway. They wanted connection; they wanted to socialize.

[From the October 2021 issue: Hannah Giorgis on the unwritten rules of Black TV]

Wasow admired the cultural cachet that AsianAvenue had already amassed—enough, by 1999, to compel Skyy Spirits to discontinue a print ad for vodka that featured a racist image of an Asian woman after the site’s users protested. Sun, for his part, wanted to expand Community Connect to new forums for other people of color. They decided to work together to build a new site that would allow users to participate in forum-style group discussions, create personal profile pages, and communicate one-on-one.

But Wasow, Sun, and the rest of the Community Connect team faced a major challenge in launching BlackPlanet: the perception that Black people simply didn’t use the internet. It was true, around the turn of the millennium, that white households were significantly more likely to have internet access than Black ones. At the same time, reports of this “digital divide” had helped foster a myth of what the media historian Anna Everett has termed “Black technophobia.” Well into the aughts, much of the coverage of Black American tech usage had a tone of incredulity or outright condescension. As a result, advertisers and investors were hesitant to back Wasow and Sun’s site. Would it really attract enough users to be viable?

Wasow felt confident that it would. The very first week it went live, in September 1999, a friend teased Wasow about the ticker on BlackPlanet’s homepage, which showed how many people were logged on at any given moment: “I logged in, and it said there were, like, 15 people online,” Wasow remembered him saying. “You sure you want to leave that up? Because it sort of feels like an empty dance floor.” By the next week, the ticker showed closer to 150 people. Every day, the number climbed higher.

Within a few months, BlackPlanet had so many users that they couldn’t possibly have squeezed onto any dance floor in New York City. Wasow began to spend much of his time speaking at marketing conferences and advertising events. Still, he and Sun struggled to attract significant capital. “Even as the site was showing real evidence of just incredible numbers, people had this story that was like, in some ways, ‘That couldn’t be!’ ” Wasow recalled. “Because the digital divide was the narrative in their heads … It wasn’t enough just to show success. We had to be insanely successful.”

By May 2001, less than two years into its run, BlackPlanet had more than 2.5 million registered users. Wasow himself had taught Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King how to surf the Net on national television (after learning how to use a mouse, the women responded on air to emails from Diane Sawyer, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Gates). BlackPlanet had secured advertising deals with the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Time magazine, and Microsoft. In the last quarter of 2002, BlackPlanet recorded its first profit. (Facebook, by contrast, did not turn a profit until 2009, five years after its launch, and Twitter didn’t until 2017, 11 years after its founding.) By then, it was the most popular Black-oriented website in America.

Wasow never forgot one seemingly trivial detail from BlackPlanet’s fledgling days. When the site went live, “the first person who logged in was ‘TastyTanya,’ ” he said, laughing. “For whatever reason, it’s now more than 20 years later and I still remember that screen name.”

I tracked down the woman once known as TastyTanya, who was 20 when she joined the site. Today, she’s a married mother of two young children who works in accounting; she prefers not to have her real name attached to her old handle. When we spoke, she recounted how strangers on the site would strike up conversations with her because someone called TastyTanya just seemed approachable. One man she met on the site even emblazoned her BlackPlanet profile picture onto a CD he burned for her and sent her in the mail, which didn’t seem creepy at the time. As quaint as that might sound now, TastyTanya’s experience perfectly illustrates what made BlackPlanet so fun. In its heyday, the site was largely populated by users just like her, people in their teens and 20s who were doing online what people in their teens and 20s have always done: figuring out who they want to be, expressing their feelings, and, of course, flirting.

[From the May 2024 issue: Hannah Giorgis on LaToya Ruby Frazier’s intimate, intergenerational portraits]

Like many early users, Shanita Hubbard came to BlackPlanet in the early 2000s as a college student, eager to take advantage of the dial-up internet in her dorm room. A member of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority at a historically Black college in South Carolina, Hubbard had heard about a cool-sounding site that would help her meet Zetas on other campuses. She chose the screen name NaturalBeauty79 and peppered her profile with references to her sorority, natural hair, and the music she loved. BlackPlanet soon became a fixture of her undergraduate experience.

Hubbard is now a freelance journalist and the author of Ride or Die: A Feminist Manifesto for the Well-Being of Black Women. When I asked her how she’d describe those days on BlackPlanet to a hypothetical Gen Zer, she laughed: “I feel like I’m trying to explain a rotary phone.”

In retrospect, she told me, it was her first experience understanding how technology could broaden her universe not just intellectually, but socially. On BlackPlanet, Hubbard befriended Black people from all walks of life, including Zetas as far away as California. “What we think Black Twitter is today is actually what BlackPlanet was eons ago in terms of connecting and building authentic community,” Hubbard said. “Except there was levels of protection within BlackPlanet that we never got on Twitter.”

Frank Dorrey

Some of the insulation was a product of the site’s scale and user makeup: BlackPlanet was both smaller and more racially homogeneous than today’s major social-media networks. Its infrastructure played a role too. Users could see who else was online or recently active, send private messages, and sign one another’s digital “guest book,” but group discussions of contentious topics tended to happen within specific forums dedicated to those issues, not on a centralized feed where bad-faith actors would be likely to jockey for the public’s attention. There was no obvious equivalent to the “Retweet” button, no feature that encouraged users to chase virality over dialogue.

BlackPlanet users talked candidly about politics, debated sports, and engaged in conversations about what it meant to be Black across the diaspora. A 2008 study found that the “Heritage and Identity” forum on BlackPlanet (as well as its equivalents on AsianAvenue and another sister site, MiGente), where users started threads such as “I’m Black and I Voted for Bush,” consistently attracted the highest engagement rate. The conversation wasn’t always friendly, but it was rarely hostile in the ways that many Black social-media users now take for granted as part of our digital lives. “There was never a time … where racists found us on BlackPlanet and infiltrated our sorority parties or flooded our little BlackPlanet pages with racist nonsense,” Hubbard said. “It’s almost like the white gaze was just not even a factor for us.”

Eventually, Hubbard began using the site for more than friendly banter. “Everyone likes to pretend it was all about formulating a digital family reunion,” she said. “That’s true. But that doesn’t tell the full story.”

In 2001, when online-dating services such as eHarmony were still in their infancy, BlackPlanet launched a dating service that cost $19.99 a month and helped members screen their would-be love interests. The site offered its members something that is still rare in online romance: Everyone who signed up for BlackPlanet’s dating service wanted to be paired with other Black people.

Soon enough, BlackPlanet romances were referenced in hip-hop lyrics and on other message boards, becoming a kind of shorthand for casual dating among young people. As Hubbard put it, BlackPlanet was “Tinder before there was swiping right, honey.”

If you wanted your BlackPlanet page to look fly—and of course you did—you had to learn how to change the background colors, add music, and incorporate flashing GIFs. At the height of the site’s popularity, the competition led some users to protect their pages by disabling the right-click function that allowed others to access their HTML codes. Giving users the opportunity to digitally render themselves made the site feel less like a staid old-school forum and more like a video game. That’s how BlackPlanet sneakily taught a generation of Black internet users basic coding skills, an accomplishment that remains among Wasow’s proudest.

Every former BlackPlanet user I spoke with for this story recalled doing at least a little coding, though most didn’t know to call it that at the time. Some told me they continued building those skills and went on to work in tech or media, at companies such as Meta and Slate. For others, though, learning HTML was just a way to express personal style. “We were our own webmaster, our own designer, our own developer,” Hubbard said. “We were maintaining it and then we would switch it up every couple of weeks to keep it fresh and poppin’.”

It wasn’t just BlackPlanet users who took note of how much fun customizing one’s own webpage could be. In late 2002, a man named Tom Anderson decided that he and his business partner should start a new social network.

When MySpace launched in 2003, the site included several features that were similar to the ones BlackPlanet had offered for years. But where BlackPlanet and the other Community Connect sites emphasized the value of shared heritage and experiences, MySpace billed itself as the universal social network. “I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster,” Anderson told Fortune in 2006 (by then, he was better known as “MySpace Tom”). “And I thought, ‘They’re thinking way too small.’ ”

MySpace didn’t immediately cut into BlackPlanet’s user base. It would take at least five years and the advent of three more major social networks before BlackPlanet saw a significant downturn in its numbers. Even as late as October 2007, when then–presidential candidate Obama joined BlackPlanet, he quickly acquired a large following.

Still, as time went on, some BlackPlanet users found themselves visiting the site less frequently. Mikki Kendall, a cultural commentator and the author of Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot, told me she didn’t spend as much time on BlackPlanet as some of her friends did in part because she thought of it primarily as a meeting space for singles. Also, its interface didn’t appeal to her. “BlackPlanet was both ahead of its time and unfortunately not far enough ahead of its time,” she said. The site was full of delays, and the mobile option seemed all but unusable. “I always felt like it was the bootleg social-media network, even though it wasn’t,” she added. “But it was run like somebody was in the back with a hammer just knocking things together and hoping it came through.”

Some observers I spoke with attributed BlackPlanet’s decline partly to the difficulty its founders had attracting capital. Wasow remembered Community Connect bringing in a total of $22 million by 2004. In 2007, Facebook received $240 million in investment funds just from Microsoft. “What does it take financially to get Facebook to where it is? How much money?” Charlton McIlwain, a professor at NYU and the author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, told me. How far into “the millions and into the billions of dollars has it taken for a Google to experiment and succeed at some things and fail at a lot of things, but then be a dominant player in that ecosystem?” Black American culture has always been a powerful engine of innovation, but this has too rarely translated into actual financial rewards for Black people.

In 2008, three years after Wasow left BlackPlanet to attend graduate school at Harvard, the Maryland-based urban-media network Radio One (now Urban One) purchased Community Connect for $38 million. At the time, BlackPlanet still had about 15 million users. But with Twitter slowly gaining attention outside Silicon Valley and Facebook beginning to overshadow MySpace, BlackPlanet simply didn’t have the resources to continue attracting the same mass of users that it once had. The rise of these social-media giants—and the industry-wide shift to prioritizing mobile experiences—decimated BlackPlanet’s numbers in the years after it was acquired.

Still, the site held on. In February 2019, BlackPlanet got a notable boost. That month, Solange Knowles released the visuals for When I Get Home, her fourth studio album, exclusively on the site. The project arose after Solange tweeted about wanting to release a project on BlackPlanet and caught the attention of Lula Dualeh, a political and digital strategist who had just started in a new role there.

“A lot of people were asking themselves the question What’s next outside of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram? ” Dualeh told me. Maybe the answer could be a return to BlackPlanet. In the days following the rollout of the When I Get Home visuals—a collection of art and music videos—BlackPlanet saw more traffic than it had in about a decade, as old and new visitors alike flocked to the site. Black Twitter was abuzz. “What I didn’t realize is that there was just this underbelly of nostalgia around BlackPlanet,” Dualeh said.

Despite the success of the Solange rollout, BlackPlanet hasn’t seen a significant, lasting bump in numbers. Nostalgia alone won’t be enough to keep users engaged—no matter how much worse Twitter (now X) has gotten. The BlackPlanet interface feels dated, with an early-2010s-Facebook quality to it, even as the posts crawling across the main feed reference music or events from 2024. Alfred Liggins, Urban One’s CEO, acknowledges that there’s work to be done on the technical side. But he argues that the site is still relevant. And although today’s BlackPlanet does often seem like a repository for WhatsApp memes, YouTube links, and conversation prompts copied over from other platforms, some users do continue to use it to share photos and reflections from their real life.

In the current internet landscape, talk of eliminating hostility from large, multiracial platforms feels idealistic at best—particularly when those platforms are owned by egotistical billionaires such as Elon Musk, who has used Twitter to endorse racist claims and alienate parts of its user base. Still, there’s reason to hope that we may be entering a new era of social networking that prioritizes real connection over conflict-fueled engagement. Several new microblogging platforms have launched in recent years. Spill, a Black-owned Twitter alternative co-founded by two of the app’s former employees, joins networks such as Mastodon and Bluesky in offering users a space that isn’t subject to the whims of provocateurs like Musk.

Wasow, for his part, is cautiously optimistic. The emergence of smaller, more dedicated digital spaces, he said, could “take us back to some of that thriving, ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’ version of online community.” It’s not that he expects people to stop using the huge social networks, Wasow said, just that he can see a world where they log on to Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram less.

The emergence of these new outlets also serves as a useful reminder: The social web can take many forms, and bigger is not always better. The thrill of the early internet derived, in part, from the specificity of its meeting places and the possibility they offered of finding like-minded people even across great distances (or of learning from people whose differing perspectives might broaden your own). Not everyone is lucky enough to meet a future spouse on their web planet of choice. But the rest of us still have the capacity to be transformed for the better by the online worlds we inhabit.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Before Facebook, There Was BlackPlanet.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.