It also helps immensely to curate lists of interests to help filter out the noise and politics.
"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.
My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.
The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.
If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.
There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.
If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.
Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.
What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?
Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.
I agree, but I think a lot of people who use it view it that way.
I don't think you wrote that the way you meant to.