This always felt like way to work around libel laws. Where they can claim "People on twitter are saying x", as an indirect way of making a claim without having to be liable for it.

I think, more broadly, it just allows them to get scandal clicks for controversial things while being able to completely disown it.

I swear to God there are articles on news sites (glorified blogs, but you know) that are along the lines of "people on twitter are saying this" and then if you actually look there is literally one (or perhaps two if you're lucky) person saying it and their post isn't even that popular. It's not that I'm surprised it's just that I know 98-99% of people are just going to take that at face value, and either allow it to confirm their pre-existing notions, or perhaps they will see it and shake their heads disapprovingly. I think this over time leads to people having distorted views of sentiment on issues, sometimes leading to really weird situations where literally most people disagree but nobody wants to be the one to say it.

Yeah it really flips things upside down when a journalist has so much access to info that they can essentially pick their own story from the data.

Maybe they can't credibly fudge the numbers, but they can find enough data to agenda-set pretty much anything.

Yeah it’s really just depressing. It’s like every news outlet wants to be just a ‘little bit’ “national enquirer” but still have everyone take them seriously. Our news industry is abjectly sensationalist.