I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires.
They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the issue with their participation, but they didn't create it.
>Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news'
We can't, but just like smoking cigarettes or shooting up opioids we can recognize it as a source of damage and addiction and start changing things to combat it.
Contrary to popular thought, the "liberal" media utterly failed minorities. The abuse of minorities in the US spans generations and has consistently been relegated to the margins of mainstream news. It has been typical in the US -- for decades -- for the NY Times to grant a single death in Israel front page coverage while a death of an African American at the hands of police in NYC would barely get coverage. My point is not that either is acceptable -- but rather that both are bad. Perhaps non-coverage of an incident in NY is worse because a NY paper might want to consider the atrocities happening right down the street.
The BLM movement finally came to the forefront not because of the "liberal" media but in spite of it. The BLM movement was enabled by Social Media. If Twitter did not exist, there is no reason to assume we would have made any progress.
The media overall and the liberal media have lost part of their control over the narrative (and the power that selective coverage conveys) and trying to blame things on social media. But believe this -- what we have seen in 2020 is progress. As messy and as ugly as it is, we've actually moved forward with minority rights.
Consider also how hypocritical the coverage has been. Liberal media tells us that "Silicon Valley lacks diversity". TBH it does, but you know the real problem is not SV, it is a national media controlled by four families with zero minorities on their boards and executive staff -- telling an industry with huge numbers of minorities (including many brown people in senior/CxO ranks) they lack diversity.
SV does need to get better, but saying SV is the start and end of all problems is absolutely false.
NYT has a "brown" person and an African-American on the current board of directors:
https://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Rogers_Jr.
Editorial Board has an African-American (Brent Staples: Education, Criminal Justice, Economics) with 30year tenure .
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/opinion/editorialbo...
One can hope. Let's tally up by 2025.
Cue the 1960s and 70s long before any social media and the amazing amount of not just protests but bombings, assassinations and so on that make the current culture war seem like a mere shouting match.
Before the media started using social media as “facts” for their reporting, these arguments would just be another online “flame war.” Remember when we used those terms? Remember when online arguments remained as just that?
Now, when 1000 people on Twitter try to cancel someone the media reports it as if it’s an actual popular opinion, thus amplifying the problem for better or worse.
I find it tough to blame the news for this — the social media companies were making deliberate design choices and the news companies were reacting in an attempt to stay in business in a rapidly changing market.
On top of that there's also two other groups that further complicate the picture: end users and advertisers.
It's not clear to me that we need to go through the motions of trying to persecute one of these groups in particular, since the situation is already evolving. End users are starting to become wise to the ways in which they are manipulated by all three of the other groups, and not necessarily always in a conscious way -- I personally had a turning point where I was just tired of the cycle, it got boring, and I didn't even have to try to consciously cut out these things, they just kind of fell away while I spent my time elsewhere.
It's hardly persecution to insist that American businesses stop doing gross harm to the American people. Your personal anecdote is largely irrelevant compared to Facebook's earnings report - lots of people still use these platforms and they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It's unlikely that these companies will pivot their business model in the absence of oversight. I've stopped using it too, but we absolutely should create market rules to deal with the obvious abuses that have occurred so they don't crop up again.
I think this is hugely presumptuous. Is there an alternative model they could have used? Are there companies using such alternative models?
It's hardly persecution to insist that American businesses stop doing gross harm to the American people.
Agreed, but it's very much not clear what the harm is. To say that it's algorithm-based advertising is not at all convincing to me, but maybe there's a good argument for that being the case that I haven't seen? What convinced you?
lots of people still use these platforms and they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future
Yes, but I think you underestimate end users. The shift away from supernormal stimuli of all kinds will be slow and arduous, but for whatever reason I have faith that we will do it. We're successfully doing it with smoking, and making good progress on the sugar + sedentary lifestyle front as well with all sorts of niche diets and fitness regimines popping up.
Although it's still super early, I see the beginnings of a move away from this particular brand of virality based social media as well. Examples would be: the popularity of long form lecture series on youtube + online classes (masterclass is fluffy, but also points in this direction), the evolution of shared blocklists on twitter and other similar methods of "bubbling" (including the rise and rise of reddit, as well as discord), the trend of non-toxic, long-lived anonymous accounts on twitter, etc. etc.
Also, and maybe I'm just being unimaginative, but what kinds of market rules would make sense here?
It probably is the most efficient model for a social media company (as you said, that's why they all do it). I don't think that type of monopoly is healthy in a market economy, and by regulating it, you allow other, more benign models a chance to grow.
> We're successfully doing it with smoking, and making good progress on the sugar + sedentary lifestyle front as well with all sorts of niche diets and fitness regimines popping up.
Are you just shitposting or are you not aware of the substantial history of prosecuting and regulating those industries, which have been instrumental in driving those changes? I don't underestimate end users - I think if you provide proper leadership and make the right thing the easy thing, then end users will do the right thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/new-food-warning-labels-beg...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Move!
If you spend most of your time around people who have a certain type of education and economic means, who do their own research, and have the liberty to control their lives to some extent then a libertarian outlook seems obvious. Outside that bubble, it becomes real clear that a lot of these problems are systemic and too big for most individuals to comprehend, let alone solve. It sounds dramatic to apply that to Facebook, but given the impact it seems to have on society, a little flair is appropriate.
> Also, and maybe I'm just being unimaginative, but what kinds of market rules would make sense here?
Apply the CCPA nationally and give users full control of their data and how it is used for starters. If you make it easy for customers to opt their data out of targeted advertising most will - if not immediately, then eventually (as you described, fatigue). If Facebook doesn't have the data, then their ad engine isn't really much better than anyone else and other business models become more attractive.
There are a bunch of different ideas about how to go about it, but taking away the data monopolies would seem to be the easiest, most self-executing solution.
Plus, the experience of eating a cookie has an inherent, positive psychological value, even if the intention is still to separate your from your money. Art vs. Science, God vs. the Devil, etc.
For an analogy imagine a town that with an arsonist setting lots of homes on fire. It is obviously true that "storing gas in your hose contributes to houses burning down", but "getting rid of gasoline in house will not fix the fires".
For clarity I consider "the algorithm" the sophisticated ordering of your follower's posts, and the recommendation of new followers. This means getting rid of "the algorithm" mostly means going back to the 00's when post where sorted by date, likes, or simple formula that combined the two. Content still went viral, and people still sorted themselves into information silos. This meant people spend more time searching for content, but I don't see any real fundamental difference that is going to result in less polarization.
The underlying problem is people communicating with other people. I argue if we got rid of the internet it would not get rid of this polarization and spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In fact you saw many similar problems prior to the Civl War, when the fastest method of communication was a telegram. People still distributed pamphlets, formed clubs with like minded individuals, gossiped, and spread rumors and falsehoods.
I think people grab on to idea "the algorithm is causes polarization", because it puts single thing, presents a specific solution (change/get rid of the algorithm), and has an specific, abstract group of people to blame the owners and employees of the big tech companies. People don't like it what the problems affecting their lives are caused by dozens of interacting forces and there is no clear simple solution, but rather a lot of work in a lot of areas.
As an aside drop in disappearing manufacturing jobs and illegal immigrants. See what you get.
It's obviously much more complicated than than that though.
But with modern social networks, a single mouse click can send it into dozens of feeds; hundreds, for some people. And then you get this effect magnified manyfold:
What damage? The stuff people wrote on it? That's the people.
That's what I love about people who think everyone should vote. But just look at Twitter. Most people are poorly informed idiots who are hyper-emotional and inclined to mob-think.
I'm all for more direct democracy but that doesn't mean I want anyone and everyone to vote. We need informed voters.
Which is why I despise the drives to get random people out to vote for whoever they heard spoken the loudest about in relation to their issues.
There is no incentive for people to become more informed. Public choice theory explains this, voters are rationally ignorant.
That’s like putting an alligator pit in a mall and blaming people for getting eaten.
Many, many people in my area regard social media as a credible source of truth. I know that people don't think much of the people where I live, and that comes from the lack of good educational opportunities afforded them out here in flyover country. But these people get to vote too. They get to participate in society as well. I guess I mean that they count. You can't say there is no one who claims social media is credible, when it is obvious there are millions who are swayed by social media precisely because it is credible in their view.
In fact, if a story is only on social media, it's proof of the story's validity in their eyes. If the mainstream media won't run a story they found on social media, then it must be part of a conspiracy to keep the "truth" from getting out. I hear this narrative everyday in my area of the midwest.
Certainly they aren't part of the legacy media, but they all seem to carry water for the same narratives and ideologies.
The non-mainstream media is publications that people in polite urban mostly-coastal American culture sneer at: Breitbart, The Post Millenial, Reason, Parler, Gab, specific independent journalists on some of the mainstream platforms, etc.
But certainly Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are media and they are mainstream. And they have demonstrated their willingness to censor stories with more or less the same bias (in the same ideological direction) as the mainstream legacy media. They're just the mainstream new media.
I'm not generally one to speak out against capitalism, but having come from a country that has 'strong, communitarian and cultural ideals' - I believe that hyper-individualism and capitalism have created an ugly, 'perfect storm of self flagellation' here with MSM, Social Media, Politics, Entertainment.
'Communitarian ideals' mean that there are unspoken rules of legitimacy, fraternity, civility, professionalism etc. that exist in many fields like the media, even in politics where all the 'grey areas' of civility count for so much, a lot of US Senate functions like this historically.
These soft ideals however leave the door way open for radicals and money-seekers to 'disrupt' and take over, justifying their cause through either 'moral legitimacy of social justice' or 'responsibility towards shareholders' - or, like in the case of Nike for example - both.
Any institution that can be instrumentalist and submitted will be.
Though I don't blame FB PM's specifically - it's right there in the ethos: 'disrupt' and 'move fast / break things / do it ask for permission later'. Without any regard at all for social and cultural ideals, they just get completely uprooted in the search for whatever it is the objective is, in the case of FB, money.
They both built a virality engine, and then acted dumbfounded (at first) when news sites used this to tune their content to go viral. It's an intentionally incredibly addictive, and borderline malicious, product that capitalizes on the worst human instincts. The entire thing exists as a feedback loop that grants you legitimacy by counting the number of eyeballs (real or not) that see it.
- block Twitter content in news articles
- block links to articles with Twitter content from ever being shown to me in the first place
Most news articles provide little value to my life anyway, but I don't think I've ever read an article referencing Twitter quotes that was worthwhile.
While I'm dreaming, if I had any way to filter all the news about what public figures say, and keep only the news about what they actually do...
It's definitely less work that investigative journalism, but to the extent that twitter is influential, it's a topic that should be covered.
IMHO, the media has (at least) two important jobs: 1) conduct novel investigations and 2) summarize the firehose of events and ideas into a form concise enough for someone to read on a daily/weekly basis. "What people are saying on social media" falls squarely into the second category.
I can list many reasons, the top few would be:
1. It is too easy to game "what people are saying" on social media
2. Loudest voices / most extreme positions get picked up, amplified, and passed off as "what people are saying"
3. It is too easy / predictable to game what kind of messages the media chooses to summarize
4. None of it matters (see my original post about what people say vs. what people do)
If an idea is worth discussing, it is worth discussing regardless of its source (social media or otherwise). Conversely, and I know this is open for debate, but Twitter is not a great medium for discussing ideas.
Social media regularly reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote:
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
That is, on average, what people are saying on social media. It is not worth summarizing and covering.
This is circular reasoning. It's only influential because journalists cover it. And they only cover it because "it's influential".
Journalists don't cover Social Media. They cover Twitter. They ignore Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, etc. Those are all social media with approximately the same user base as Twitter (Reddit probably has more). But totally ignored by print journos.
I disagree that would be "the valuable version." That's just "the more quantified" version. A music critic's list of the 100 best songs of 2020 is not inferior to Billboard's list of the 100 most popular songs of 2020 as determined by quantified data.
Twitter is a cultural phenomenon, and its milieu(s) and output aren't completely unworthy of journalistic attention. That's not to say it's a top shelf subject, but the "news" properly covers all kinds of similar things, and some, like sports for instance, have even less value.
It's the difference between a music critic choosing the 100 best songs (fine, because it's a person's own opinion presented honestly) versus a music critic saying they're just going with the popular consensus while cherry picking tweets that happen to pick the 100 they would have chosen (bad, because the tweets aren't put into context). Or like a traditional paper looking for a scientist who will say something exciting/sensational in a particular direction, then presenting it as scientific consensus.
You can find a group saying anything on twitter. That means that the fact that some particular thing exists on it is useless.
It takes work to filter out the noise, (& there's plenty of noise to avoid!), but one can select the actual scientists diong the research, who will link to their key findings & papers, answer questions, etc., or direct to current & former officials, key industry/govt players, the journalists themselves and get their comments directly, without the scaled editorial slant. (private lists, to avoid the algorithmic feed is the key; I don't think it is possible on FB)
So I guess I somehow do block twitter?
It's not like we weren't warned.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism."
"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with [indulgences]."
"As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
"In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
I've been rereading McLuhan, Postman, Huxley, etc.
Manufacturing Consent is the most directly applicable to understanding social media. With at least two updates to the thesis.
#1
The outrage machine is fueled by advertising, right? What's new is the motivating control (choice) moved from the advertiser's intent to the algorithmic recommenders.
#2
Third parties learned to effectively manipulate the algorithmic recommenders. So whereas before the gatekeepers acted as a great filter, third parties are now able to command attention and drive narratives.
--
Forgive me for stumbling over my descriptions. I'm just now trying to write out my notions. And I don't think any of this is "new". Just that with the new medium upsetting the old constraints and balances, different parts of the ecosystem are more impactful.
Great video. I’d never heard Postman speak before. Thanks.
There are more videos of him there, including an hour and a half lecture. I suppose that’s ironic, but not very, because NP was open to the idea that computer technology could lead to useful media. He just didn’t get to experience much of it in his lifetime.
Now, we can experience him through it, which is a blessing in this time.
:-)
The purpose of purchaing advertising is to increase sales of the advertised product or service. How does the "outrage machine" lead to increased sales of the products or services being advertised? Do you think many people are actually buying products through advertisements posted in, say, Trump vs. AOC flamewars?
Who has the (most) power in the social media ecosystem? Certainly not the advertisers. Today, the power balance has shifted to the aggregators (h/t Stratechery) and the trolls.
Here's a loaded question that might help explain the new power dynamic: Who are the current targets of dissastified customers? During broadcast era (the time of Manufacturing Consent), people boycotted advertisers and brands. Today, people boycott the aggregators (FAANG) and influencers (aka cancel culture).
Take it one step further. Let's call manipulating the algorithm "trolling" (for lack of a better term). What leverage does anyone have over the trolls? I find it very weird, a la roshambo, that there are no effective checks on their power. As in, how does one protest or boycott a troll farm? Even the aggregators struggle to check the trolls.
It doesn't account for this specific example, the use of outrage as an instrument of social control.
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Although said by one of the Nazi leaders - I don't think it is any less true.
This was not about a totalitarian government burning books.
This was about a population numbing themselves with bright colours, bland affirmation and meaningless feeds of facts. With vacuous, superficial interaction with friends and family through screens. They burned the books themselves, so they didn't have to encounter anything challenging.
"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. ... Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side."
One factor in that is America is a pretty unequal society, and problems the relatively wealthy [1] face receive disproportionate attention than those primarily confined to the less wealthy. Not saying that's the only factor, but it's definitely a major one.
Ditto with de-industrialization, which a sibling comment mentioned. The relatively wealthy gain disproportionately from it in the short term, and those who are disproportionately hurt by it are less wealthy and typically live in unfashionable areas. Predictably, their problems get relatively less attention than they probably should (esp. since the relatively wealthy have the option of hand-waving those problems away with stuff like "Pareto efficiency," etc.).
[1] I'd count software engineers and similar professionals as "relatively wealthy."
Because I sure don't see opiate abuse or ODs as a problem disproportionately affecting the poor. Sure, it affects a lot of poor people, but it also affects a fair number of the wealthy, quite possibly in numbers greater than their proportion in the population. (It's hard to judge because every celebrity overdose will be widely reported, so availability bias might be affecting my perception.)
Your rephrase lost an important nuance. I said "problems the relatively wealthy face." Bathroom choice is a problem wealth can't really solve or mitigate, so it's one they still face (either directly or through their children or peers).
> but it also affects a fair number of the wealthy, quite possibly in numbers greater than their proportion in the population. (It's hard to judge because every celebrity overdose will be widely reported, so availability bias might be affecting my perception.)
IMO, celebrity drug abuse is kinda a different thing, because celebrities are a special, tiny class that's easy to hold yourself apart from.
Why? That has nothing to do with my point. Even if the US was in fact the most equal society to ever exist, it's indisputable that it still has significant inequality, which was the starting point of my comment.
> it's indisputable that it still has significant inequality
I was trying to understand where you were coming from and giving you the opportunity to change my mind.
As for the issue itself, the wikipedia article has a pretty good overview of the whole thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares...
A frank discussion about industrial policy would not inure to the benefit of any established political actor. It's a story of breathtaking incompetence, callousness, greed, and self-deception.
Yes, they are, and in 2016, both political parties faced outsider candidates running surprisingly strong campaigns in their Presidential primaries on explicitly repudiating different aspects of neoliberalism, including deindustrialization.
But one of those candidates was Donald Trump, and it was much more important to point out what a rude, crude bastard he was, 24/7, than to discuss the issues of political economy raised by the outsider populists. The point was to crush them, to avoid anyone in the political sphere questioning deindustrialization and financialization.
Four years later, we know that trying to silence populism while also giving Trump, a populist, 24/7 earned-media coverage did not work. At the time, though, people expected it to work.
For one thing, guesstimating the number of affected people is pretty subjective. A policy can be important to me even though it does not nominally affect me directly. Secondly, this method doesn't even attempt to weigh policies by anything else, like the magnitude of benefits/downsides, budgetary concerns, civil rights implications, etc. For instance, in my view, it's fine for a political issue involving state-sanctioned persecution or bigotry of a very small minority to share political attention with a large public health crisis.
The first example that comes to mind is US armed service veterans. Apparently, the medical care they received from the Veteran's Administration was really terrible, with apocryphal stories of veterans dying while waiting for appointments to see Drs. There were many bad actors in the VA medical service who would have been fired in any other organization but due to VA policy, kept their jobs. Through programs such as VA Choice and VA Accountability[0], the approval rating of the VA jumped to 91%, a record.
In the US, there are 17.4 million veterans, and as you indicated, they all have family and friends who are going to see these improvements in a positive light.
It makes me wonder how many other situations there are like this that we don't hear about.
On the other end, the president can pardon one person at a time. Perhaps that's the least number of people who can be positively affected by one act.
[0] https://www.va.gov/opa/choiceact/documents/choice-act-summar...
That's correlation, not causation. Even if there's a connection to election years, the causality could very well be reversed (e.g. activists increase their efforts to get attention when it matters most). However, I'm inclined to think your observation is just coincidence or misses a critical factor.
But the Washington Post has statistics that clearly show there's no four year cycle to police shootings: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
Just wait until 2024 and they'll pick another case to hype up. Despite the fact that police brutality happens every year and nothing gets done about it. It's all bread and circuses.
I'm surprised that you say that the main culprit is the main stream media. I see this kind of reporting in all news outlets, especially non-MSM. It's cheap and trivial to write an article that highlights some comments from four people with 15 twitter followers a piece, and claim that "People are saying".
You even hear the POTUS frequently use "people are saying" and then quoting whackadoos from Twitter. Can we really hold MSM to a higher standard than the president of the free world?
And that journalists have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their job is to file copy to strict deadlines.
Let’s challenge that assumption with historical precedent.
A technological and social revolution of sorts in the 1800s. In the first world of the time, the masses became literate and had more leisure time. Combined with advances in the technology of printing and paper production, and in distribution of the physical book, it led to an explosion of interest in something called “the novel”. It was almost a madness at the time, cf. the popularity of Charles Dickens works.
But eventually the violent boiling cooled to a simmer. A continuous simmer, but just a simmer culturally. I don’t know how or why the dynamic changed, but it did settle down.
I’d guess a similar analogy could be made with “the theater”, which is even below a simmer at this point in modern culture.
What will change the dynamic? Your guess is as good as mine...
The entire internet should take this advice, firstly for the reason you stated, and also because the Twitter website UX is appalling.
Agree with your statement of this being a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle. The push for free news on the internet may have also contributed.
Alice wants to read the news, Bob wants to write it. Mallet wants to foster discussion of an idea of dubious worthiness to further nefarious but unstated aims.
Alice is attracted to lurid, weird and scary, even though she mostly knows better, because we all are.
Bob is attracted to easy stories, because it is hard to run a paper today.
Mallet doesn't care too much about how his poison gets out there, only that it does.
Among other things, this suggests that any one thing, like not embedding Twitter quotes, is unlikely to make much difference - Mallet will shift to something else.
That's the problem here. Kill the advertising dependency, and Mallet will find it much harder to spread their poison.
Much as this is reassuring, its not the whole story.
Yes, the "MSM", well parts of them report chaff because its cheap.
But why bother? because it sells.
In some cases there are editors that push a certain stance or opinion. even more rare are the cases where they manage to actually shift a section of society's world view permanently.
The problem is perfectly illustraited by the german newspaper "DER SPIEGEL" it literally means "the mirror"
Both social, print and to a lesser extent tv news(the uk is highly regulated) are a mirror on society.
They push what sells, and if its comfortable lies, then it so be it.
So no, the main problem is not "the media" its us for consuming shit.
If we stop reading gossip, junk and "punditry" then they'll stop making it. Its as simple as that.
I think you're 100% correct, social media stories are the equivalent of the cute fluffy stories 20 years ago, but there's a huge moral hazard associated with that.
Thoses enquetes were done on somewhate crowded yet non busy places for convenience, and tended to sample a specific part of the population: e.g. people going to shopping districts at off hours, or people coming out of church for the most biased samplings.
Telephone checks were similar in that you had a very high percentage of at home caregivers responding to them.
Do you the past journalistic methods as that much more sophisticated than nowadays ?
Some news about tweets is justified - for example the president of the US has at times announced policies on Twitter first. It's a modern equivalent of making an brief announcement to the press or sending out a very sparse press release.
And the tweets that you (and I) hate to see reported, those of random people and especially headlines like "Twitter goes mad about (whatever)" somehow making an entire article out of quoting 6 random Twitter users... it's a digital form of voxpops on TV or reader's letters in newspapers. All of them can be a nice addition at times, but in my opinion the vast majority shouldn't be part of a "news" medium.
It's driven by any participant who is making money from the political process. This includes MSM, Social Media, Political Consultants, and on and on.
"Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's helping to shape what becomes a story.
I think a lot of it is probably a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle — social media is in easy reach and available at whatever point you're writing your article.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news', but would be interesting if a newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles.