One of the absolute laziest ways to write a "news" article is the "here are a list of things people tweeted about this topic" compilation.

> One of the absolute laziest ways to write a "news" article is the "here are a list of things people tweeted about this topic" compilation.

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 very very strongly reject the idea that "What people are saying on social media" is worth summarizing or covering by the media.

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.

> ...to the extent that twitter is influential, it's a topic that should be covered.

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.

Your #2, summarizing, isn't what I usually see in these "here's what people are saying on Twitter" stories. The valuable version that you're talking about would have to include things like polls or something, saying "20% of people agree with this idea, 5% agree with this other idea, etc." Instead, these stories just say here's some tweets that are really edgy/funny/gotchas/something I agree with."

> The valuable version that you're talking about would have to include things like polls or something, saying "20% of people agree with this idea, 5% agree with this other idea, etc."

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 not the quantification that makes it important, it's that it's being put into context. When you see a list of twenty tweets holding the same viewpoint, the main question is whether they are representative (and of whom are they representative). Whether you say "70%" or just "most people," it's the same value that's missing usually. The quantification doesn't matter.

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.

I see this a lot in an attempt to smear a candidate or public figure: “Here are some abhorrent Tweets from their followers”. Of course, it’s an enumeration fallacy—there’s no way of knowing whether those Tweets accurately represent the candidate’s followers or not. That said, journalists are happy to find real life followers of candidates/etc with abhorrent views, but I suppose Twitter makes it easier to create the desired spin.

OTOH, if you spend sufficient effort to curate your lists, you can enjoy a BETTER news feed than from major media, who even if they aren't straight-up biased, are full of their own constraints to fill airtime, not offend sponsors, etc.

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)

I appreciate RSS for that reason. Information is opt-in.

Twitter links on my phone never work... i will click on the link to a tweet, and then it will just say "failed to load content"

So I guess I somehow do block twitter?

I get this a lot and not just on my phone. What is wrong with their site?

They definitely block all of AWS, are you using a VPN or similar aggregated connection?

Sometimes, yes. It seems like it usually fails when I first go to a tweet from a link on another site. Then if I refresh the page it might finally load.

Mobile site is broken. Switch to Desktop view.

Using Ublock Origin you could turn on advanced mode and block all scripts from twitter domains. Not only Twitter itself will be blocked (it'll show up as a blank page, although you can disable that specifically for twitter), but all Tweet embeds will be too.