Who else hates news stories being based on random twitter responses?

Anyone else hate these types of stories? They've been around for a while but I've just been noticing them more lately. They all follow the same format. "Politician/Celebrity/Companybashed/slammed/face backlash for statement/comments/actions"

And then the whole basis of the story is just 3 or so random people's comments on twitter (or facebook or whatever). Why is this even news? Who cares what random people on twitter think?

If you've ever looked at anything on social media you can find people complaining about anything and everything no matter what the subject. You could post a picture of some kittens playing and someone will bash it claiming animal abuse.

And to make it even dumber you could cherry pick some other random people's comments and completely change the nature of the story depending on what agenda the editorial slant of the website is trying to push. Doesn't matter what kind of news site it is, everyone does them. You can easily change "Politician Slammed for Divisive Statement" to "Politician Lauded for Courageous Statement" by just grabbing some different tweets.

I guess it's just the modern version of "and now we go to the street for comments from local citizens" type stories I'd on TV (which are also useless) see growing up.

Anyway...yes, news media is dumb is hardly a groundbreaking statement but the "random tweets as news stories" thing has become a big pet peeve of mine.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Who else hates news stories being based on random twitter responses?