> Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about.

It's a source of information for what Reddit and Twitter owners want you to see. Both websites are heavily manipulated in a myriad of ways. (The simplest one is via massive amounts of accounts banned for wrongthink.) This is blatantly obvious if instead of passively absorbing news you deep-dive into a specific issue and then look up the discussions and trends, especially on Reddit. Sometimes discussions for major events just aren't there, which is nigh impossible organically on a website with tens of millions of users.