It would be better if journalists treated Twitter as if anyone that they haven't personally laid eyes on behind a Twitter handle, was a bot. And even in those cases, to exercise a great degree of skepticism.
Twitter is great, and I love it, but it is one of the last reserves of chaos and shit-postery on the mainstream internet. It is full of bots, trolls, personas, and just plain crazy people, and any kind of zeitgeist distilled from it should be taken with a pillar of salt.
Normal people are just not aware of what is going on on Twitter, except to the extent that the news interjects their reporting with Twitter controversies.
True, so many articles show a spread of tweets that say one thing or another but it's unclear if they even reached out to those people for comment, if they exist at all.
That's a great point. I accept 4Chan and despise Twitter, both of which being cesspools of lunatics, but now I realize that I'd feel the opposite if the media reported on 4Chan drama instead and mostly left Twitter alone.
Which is to say, if members of the media were 4Chan users instead of Twitter users. Or more generally, the social ills I've been blaming on Twitter are really the result of the commentary class inflicting its own obsession with social media on the rest of us.
Twitter is great, and I love it, but it is one of the last reserves of chaos and shit-postery on the mainstream internet. It is full of bots, trolls, personas, and just plain crazy people, and any kind of zeitgeist distilled from it should be taken with a pillar of salt.
Normal people are just not aware of what is going on on Twitter, except to the extent that the news interjects their reporting with Twitter controversies.
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