Twitter is 100% a cesspool, and the media's obsession with it has come at a heavy price to journalism. The number of articles which are essentially "people on Twitter hold some nutty opinion, here's 9 tweets that show it!" just fans the flames on the culture wars.

Ultimately, the issue is that journalists tend to be rank hypocrites. They sit on their soap boxes crying that there are all these fringe, loony people spreading disinformation, awful ideas, hatred, etc. and then they take these voices and amplify them and give them legitimacy by treating them as a serious thing and using their own channels to discuss it. And worse, the journalists themselves are absolutely ADDICTED to the chaos. It not only feeds their egos to get the likes, clicks, and even the hateful replies... it's critical to their financial well-being. How can these folks sit there complaining about all of the evil ideas being propagated on Twitter when they put the spotlight on them, how can they be mad at trolls when they don't do much differently and do it for the same reasons?

And I say this as someone who wrote for 14 years for large publications. I saw the same tendencies in myself and it was a struggle to contain it and control it. In the early years, I had to work hard to keep my writing focused on "what delivers value to my readers?" instead of "what will 'feel good' to me because it drives reader engagement?" It's very difficult and takes a lot of self-awareness that I think a lot of people lack.

J.Ja