When Angelica Nwandu launched The Shade Room on Instagram in 2014 its main focus was to platform cultural issues of interest to Black audiences. Now, a decade later, the media company has expanded to also cover hard news and politics.
Shade Room representatives have attended political events such as a proclamation signing at the White House and gotten exclusive interviews too. In an October 14 video, Kamala Harris “stepped into The Shade Room” to discuss with journalist Justin Carter her plans to support Black men. And during the 2020 presidential race, The Shade Room interviewed then candidate Joe Biden and published an exclusive video from President Barack Obama.
Since expanding to TikTok and other digital platforms in recent years, Shade Room coverage has amassed more than 40 million followers — a majority of whom are Black women, according to the media company — across social media platforms.
With the 2024 presidential election just weeks away, voters are looking for reliable news sources, and campaigns are eager to reach large audiences amassed by accounts such as The Shade Room. The Pew Research Center found in a recent survey that Black adults, in particular, are more likely than white Americans to regularly turn to sites like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for news.
Social media can provide innovative pathways to accessing news, but it can also be a cesspool of political misinformation. In addition, there is the complex history of biased reporting by traditional media on communities of color, the uncertain future of staple Black publications like Ebony and Jet magazines, and layoffs across the field of journalism that have impacted reporting by Black journalists, leaving some Black news consumers unsure of where to look for reliable coverage.
The Shade Room, despite its reach and increased political access, has received criticism in outlets like HuffPost and MSNBC for spreading misinformation or leaving it to fester unchecked in the comments section. The brand platformed disputed conservative talking points about a central bank digital currency last year and incorrectly told followers that the Biden administration was planning to fund the distribution of “crack pipes” in 2022. In reality, MSNBC reported, the administration had approved funding for harm-reduction initiatives, including “safe smoking kits” intended to help reduce the spread of infectious diseases and the risk of overdose associated with illicit drug use. The White House called The Shade Room’s post and coverage by conservative outlets on the topic “misleading and misinformed.” The Shade Room subsequently deleted the post and published an updated story, according to MSNBC.
In an October 11 statement to Teen Vogue, a spokesperson for The Shade Room said the media company "prioritizes reporting that is accurate, fair, balanced, and transparent." However, according to a late-September statement from the spokesperson, the company hasn’t always "been given a seat at the table during major news moments," which means they “occasionally” have to aggregate from secondary sources. In those instances, the spokesperson explained further, the brand links or cites its sourcing in social media captions or within its website articles whenever possible. In the last year, the spokesperson added, the company has invested in Associated Press and Poynter training and certifications for its staff, and is currently working with a political consultancy to inform its coverage.
Instagram posts from The Shade Room regularly garner thousands of comments, and that’s apparently by design. The spokesperson for the media brand said the purpose of its founding was to “create a platform that fostered conversation on trending cultural topics relevant to the Black community." Those who don’t follow The Shade Room may be unfamiliar with the communal approach for engaging its nearly 30 million Instagram followers by referring to them as “roommates” and prompting users to DM the outlet story tips and engage in, often heated, discussions. Some Shade Room captions end with “Thoughts?” (Even celebrities join in, sometimes commenting to defend themselves and arguing with users.)
But not everyone agrees with The Shade Room's approach. Some users have taken to the comments section to critique the brand's coverage and others have shared their complaints elsewhere online. A number of Black journalists have also been vocal online with their criticisms of the media company.
Onyx Impact, a nonprofit organization that works to reduce the spread of harmful information to Black communities, released a 2024 analysis of online disinformation impacting Black Americans. The nonprofit listed The Shade Room as an example of a “gateway platform,” described by Onyx as a media organization that "often unintentionally" acts as a "high-value [target] for bad actors to introduce harmful narratives." Onyx said The Joe Budden Podcast and The Breakfast Club also fall into this category. (The latter two outlets did not respond to Teen Vogue requests for comment.)
Teen Vogue recently spoke with a few Black, Gen Z social media users about their decision to unfollow The Shade Room. Avery Hawes, 22, used to follow The Shade Room and similar pages simply because she was a “nosy teenager” who enjoyed celebrity gossip. But Hawes, an Indiana-based political science student, says she grew frustrated by posts from the media brand and its comments section, which she felt often included inaccurate, anti-vax rhetoric during COVID.
Teen Vogue did not find any evidence of The Shade Room sharing misinformation about COVID on its website; the coverage Teen Vogue reviewed often cited information released by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Teen Vogue did, however, find that Instagram users often commented with inaccurate information about the virus and vaccinations.
“I remember even going back and forth with certain people in the comment section about those things,” Hawes says. “I just felt like [The Shade Room wasn’t] doing anything to suppress misinformation.” The comment section of the brand’s posts about COVID was one of the final straws that prompted Hawes to unfollow the page in 2020. She also called out its posts about LGBTQ+ celebrities.
“[The Shade Room will] post someone doing something, [who] might be trans or they might be queer, and they'll say, ‘Thoughts?'” says Hawes. ”There's almost no room in a comment section like The Shade Room for progressive dialogue.”
Like Hawes, Desiree’ Doss, 23, was drawn to pop culture news. Doss, a recent college graduate, says she followed The Shade Room and similar pages when she first joined social media. Around the time she graduated high school, though, Shade Room posts about queer celebrities and queer children of celebrities, and the subsequent homophobia and transphobia that ensued in the comments, became a major turn-off for her, she recalls.
The Shade Room has posted extensively about Zaya Wade, Dwyane Wade’s 17-year-old transgender daughter. The media company’s posts have been largely supportive of Zaya, but the comments have often been filled with vitriol from users. The Shade Room has also shared rapper Boosie Badazz’s controversial videos and comments about Zaya and her father.
A spokesperson for The Shade Room tells Teen Vogue that the brand receives roughly two to three million comments per week on Instagram alone, but makes an effort across social media sites to mitigate hateful comments. “We use each platform’s built-in filtering tools to automatically hide comments that may be inappropriate, offensive, or bullying. Our staff also identifies ways commenters may misspell a word to get around this and enter them into the advanced comment-filtering systems, like the ‘Hidden Words’ feature on Instagram and Facebook. The effectiveness of moderation tools fluctuates across platforms, with some platforms offering more effective tools than others.”
The spokesperson adds, “It continues to be a priority for us to find ways to build on what the platforms offer to create the safest possible space for our community to engage with one another. Moreover, you cannot find homophobic or harmful comments on our owned and operated platforms.”
Maya Bailey, a 26-year-old attorney in Texas, says The Shade Room was once her primary way of getting news. In the late 2010s, she began following news sources like the BBC, AJ+, and NowThis. Eventually she unfollowed and blocked The Shade Room because she believed the platform's posts were negatively portraying Black people. “If I don't want The Shade Room to continue succeeding or for them to change their ways, I need to stop engaging with what they're producing,” she says.
The Gen Z social media users who spoke with Teen Vogue say, in particular, they felt like Tory Lanez’s shooting of fellow rapper Megan Thee Stallion opened the floodgates for misogynistic comments on Shade Room posts. In July 2020, Lanez shot Megan in the feet. Two months later, the Shade Room covered the release of Daystar, Lanez’s 17-track album that referenced Megan and the incident. Last August, Lanez was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the shooting. Both Hawes and Bailey say they unfollowed Shade Room shortly after the shooting occurred. Doss had unfollowed the brand before the shooting, but was still seeing its content when shared by friends and on Instagram’s explore page.
A Shade Room spokesperson says the media company believes its coverage of the shooting and Lanez’s subsequent trial “reflected accurate commentary on both sides of the fence.” The spokesperson continues, “Unfortunately, Megan Thee Stallion received pushback from a lot of her peers in the industry, primarily men, and TSR felt it necessary to include that part of the cultural commentary in our reporting. TSR isn’t trying to paint a false picture of what’s right or wrong with the culture; the only picture it seeks to paint is an honest one."
Ultimately, concerns about the spread of mis- and disinformation across today's internet landscape are bigger than any one media company, says Bridget Todd, creator and host of the iHeart Radio technology podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet. Users should always be on the lookout for potentially inflammatory content, as the social media ecosystem profits off the user engagement this kind of coverage can help drive.
“We're not talking about your auntie sharing some bad information just because it came across her WhatsApp group,” Todd explains. “Maybe that's part of it, but we're also talking about a thriving, lucrative ecosystem where sharing inflammatory lies online and amplifying those lies is big business that is making people wealthy.”
While some Gen Z social media users are making a choice to divest from sites that spread mis- and disinformation, Todd argues, real impact will require changes to the digital platforms themselves. This goes beyond individuals unfollowing or reporting posts, she says: “Any kind of real solution is going to involve legislative action at some level, and I think it has to meaningfully prompt platforms to do better.”
Doss believes there’s a need for robust Black news organizations, but says she isn’t satisfied with the current media landscape: “I think [we] just have to be more concerned with how we do it…. There definitely has to be more fine tuning.”
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