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The problem is also the media. Twitter outrage mobs aren’t so effective on their own because average people don’t read twitter. But news sites often pick up these outrage mobs and shun a light on them. Which amplifies the outrage and puts it in places regular people read.

And then companies have to act on it because the media sites are reposting tweets claiming the cloudflare CEO wants to see trans people die or whatever the thing of the day is.

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Every single day I see "reputable" news sites put out headlines like "Twitter outrage over [X]" and I think this is why journalism is dying. The "man on the street" piece has a time-honored place in journalism, but previous generations understood that the opinions of random strangers are not, in and of themselves, NEWS. They were fluff pieces and human interest bits, not headlines. They constitute opinion at best, and usually closer to gossip most of the time. I don't blame Twitter itself, per se. But it is easier for journalists to find opinions than to find facts, and that has certainly led to a degradation in quality of news stories and a near total loss of understanding of what constitutes bias in journalism.

Absolutely. I'm sure media was always a retread of an official / inside feed from somewhere, but it feels so much more automatic now.

24/7 to fill with content = {scrape social media trends} -> {generate story} -> {repeat}

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