I think that Twitter is very much the tail that wags the dog. Sure, 1 out of 50 normal people may use it, but nearly 1 out of 1 reporters use it. Those reporters often quote opinions on it as if they are representative of the larger public, even if the tweet they quote is by someone with 10 followers and no stars.
The fun thing about social media is that reporters can back up any narrative they want. “People are upset about X”, “Gen Z is doing X”, “Millenails are killing X”. Find two people and it's a confirmed trend!
I saw this happen live and I couldn't believe it. There was this Netflix movie last year called "Kate" that has a white female assassin killing a lot of asian people (it takes place in Tokyo). There were a handful of articles (first in places like Yahoo news and then sites like Slate.com) written about how this is racist and they all quoted people on twitter. Since I was following this movie heavily, I saw the tweets come in real time and the subsequent articles written a day later. In the end it all started from one tweet from a random user which then spread into a small handful other people making a similar comment and then leaving it at that. These tweets then got turned into multiple articles. I could not believe how crazy the whole thing was.
The original tweet author did not give permission for her thoughts to be published in so many articles and apparently endured a lot of harassment(She indicated this on subsequent tweets). She eventually deleted the tweet.
This was the original tweet: "Shame on Netflix for this. After this past year especially, to then release a film that is literally white people murdering Asian people based on stereotypes and fetishization??? Hard pass.”
If you google that quote you'll see how many articles quote that tweet.
There were no winners in this whole saga. The movie takes place in Tokyo so of course asian men are going to be the bad guys. So Netflix endured negative press for nothing. The press didn't actually change anything about the film, it obviously pissed off enough people that it caused them to start looking for the tweet author to harass her and finally she deleted her tweet. Who were the winners? The site owners making the money I guess. The whole thing really shows how much of a joke online media is. When regular establishment press is not that good either, what are people to do?
There might be a huge wave of people just ignoring online news and deleting social media(ie. disconnecting). That could very well be the end state for many people. In the above example, if the tweet authors had restricted their account visibility to people only they know, then possibly the articles would never have been written. If enough people get burned out they might just walk away.
Ironically the white female actress who plays the assassin in the film: Mary Elizabeth Winstead was herself a victim of massive online targeting and harassment.
She had already once deleted her public accounts in protest after the famous iCloud hacks in the early 10s because people were ogling her private nude photos and then harassing her about it after she scolded "the internet". She came back a few years later only to delete everything all over again in 2017 when she got non stop barrage after she went through a bad divorce. Its tough for actors who are in the business of selling themselves to just walk away from all public social media.
I think people who weren't into tech and who came of age before the internet became mainstream might be the first people to disconnect from this social media nonsense. She was early 80s and homeschooled to focus all her waking moments on becoming an actress. Gen-Z/Alpha might never disconnect. Have they ever known anything different? It will be interesting to see what happens.
Except, one person telling someone else "I don't like <thing>" and other people responding with "Hey yeah I don't like <thing> too!" is literally how it has worked forever, even before computers. Newspapers have been running "<THING> BAD" or "<THING> GOOD" headlines with no or weak backing for literal centuries.
I saw a reddit post today that "Disney fans are furious that Avatar was temporarily pulled from Disney Store" and the top 500 comments were like "No one is furious".
Here, I'll give it a go: "Environmentalists are furious that Bill Gates kills mosquitos"
I did a quick Twitter search, and unfortunately your story isn't supported by any tweets I can find. Good news: you get to write a story about conspiracy theories about Gates and mosquitoes instead though! https://twitter.com/lorijean333/status/1561224522166067201?s...
It annoys me to see this. Quoting tweets is the laziest form of journalism. But to be fair to journalists, finding a couple of real world people and quoting their opinions as if they are representative of the larger public isn’t any more rigorous.
And it’s possible to cherry-pick people to push any narrative you want. Like the NYT talking about how GenZ is very pro-life, quoting several pro-life youngsters. Meanwhile buried somewhere in that long article is the lede - only 20% of GenZ is pro-life.
I'm involved in a community advocacy organisation that uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for public engagement.
Facebook is a great platform for actually getting normal people to see our content and invite them along to our meetings and such. Twitter, on the other hand, has a far more niche audience - but I know for a fact that the niche audience includes several state legislators who follow us and interact with our tweets, and we've gotten several press stories via contacts we've made with journalists over Twitter.
If you've got a message to get out there, it's a highly strategic platform.
