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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of news articles about Twitter because journalists use twitter, and have come to depend on it to boost their readership.

Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers.

These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.

Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.

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> These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.

No, journalists hate that Musk took away the digital caste system that they took advantage of, where they (blue checks) were an elite ruling class. Now they are on equal footing as, and are forced to engage with, whom they perceive as the "Dalit scum" of the platform, who bought their way in for a measly $8.

Twitter was one of the most segregated societies on the planet, and Musk upturned its power structure nearly overnight and made it a more democratic society (albeit one with a benevolent dictator). Yet we all sat and watched while celebrities and journalists threw public temper tantrums, reminiscing about a time when life was better in their online universe, during the digital apartheid days, and their followers who sympathized. Talk about disruptive.

journalists use twitter and love to pretend that everybody else does too, and pass a few tweets as "the people have spoken" all the time.

Yes, journalists confuse (or confused) Twitter with what "the people" are thinking.

A prominent case: A few years ago, J.K. Rowling wrote an article on gender bathroom policy. I'm pretty sure most random people, when given the piece to read, would have judged it to be some rather moderate opinion. But on Twitter the author encounterd a massive wave of accusations and hostility. The journalists were probably sympathetic with those people, and moreover thought them to be in the majority among the general population (because the JKR criticisms were in the majority on Twitter).

So the journalists went out and wrote news pieces casually describing Rowling as being a transphobic, as if this was an uncontroversial description of fact, like the sky being blue, when it was really a serious accusation by the journalist. Their Twitter filter bubble confuses them about which views are common and which are fringe.

Yep, also comms/marketing people. I once had to explain to someone that nobody outside of Twitter has ever cared about anything that has ever happened on Twitter. It is a pure bubble of unimportant drivel.

The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.

In the eyes of NHK (the Japanese broadcaster), Twitter is internet and internet is Twitter.

Every single time they say "Let's see what people on the internet are saying.", the scene always changes over to tweets and tweets and tweets.

Journalism is beyond redemption.

And loudmouths with outrageous opinions love Twitter because they know their precious tweets will eventually get caught by some semi-popular website one day.

Journalists aren't the biggest user base, just the most prominent and the people who "need" Twitter (or something like it) the most in our society.

This is one of the reasons I left that field.

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