"There was large scale outrage on twitter about decision X..." followed by an embed of one of three tweets.
It would be very interesting to chart the rise of twitter citations as compared to other sources.
Those kinds of statements are so vague that they’re pretty much always guaranteed to be true, so you don’t even need to provide a factual basis for them, but before Twitter news outlets would just go and interview random uninformed passers by on the street and gather a couple of good common-man sound bites to reinforce whatever bad opinion it is they’re pushing. My favourite technique that I’ve seen become more common over the past few years is to print an article claiming “x is facing online death threats” for anybody they want to generate some sympathetic support for. Are such headlines true? Almost certainly. Would that headline be true for any public figure you can possibly think of? Almost certainly.
It's trivially easy to affect real change on Twitter through bots, so it should come as no surprise that that's exactly what's happening.
Twitter isn't disgusting because of what people say on it, it's disgusting because of how it makes people feel.
Despite this, if the embedded tweets do not contain primary evidence or quality secondary evidence, it would become more difficult for it to gain real traction in other news outlets, no?
I'd suggest you read Manufacturing Consent.
I think you've got that backwards. Journalists quoting tweets to construct the desired narrative gave legitimacy to twitter.
Trump rode on those coat-tails. His birther campaign should have never gained mainstream traction but the media couldn't help themselves from reporting on a conspiracy theory because Trump is a salacious figure.
They Streisand effected his entire campaign and presidency.