Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. Social media has produced an environment in which short, highly emotional content reproduces the fastest, thus the evolution of information in our society has trended toward memetic oversimplifications and absolutes, driven by vanity and outrage and virtue signaling. We are optimizing for the worst qualities of discussion at the largest scales.

And yet it seems hard to imagine it could be any other way. Our evolutionary biology and inbred tribalism, social proclivities and laziness are what make the platforms so popular, the evolution of our memes is directly tied to our evolutionary biology's feedback mechanisms. It's hard to see just how we could optimize for nuanced, balanced and productive discussion at scale. We have platforms that could in theory optimize in that direction, but the widest audiences trend toward the simplest to consume content (reddit is filled with interesting discussion in the right places, but most of its audience just see the quick reinforcing memes that occupy the front page).

So do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? Well if we value nuance and balance in our information then yes, any attention on Twitter is probably too much. But of course we don't, not at scale, rather we value audience size. And for that Twitter is a great place to pay attention. Hence much modern journalism is just a glorified retweet, part of Twitter and Facebook even if it is posted elsewhere. In the memes arms race the best weapons are those that can be spread widely and quickly, and for that Twitter provides ample ammunition.