I'm really tired of mainstream articles which are essentially a reporting finding 3 people on twitter who are for/against something and saying "internet is in uproar about whatever"
There’s quite a lot of formulaic pieces written in UK media where the news outlet comment section has more outraged commenters than the original issue.
If you use dailymail.co.uk and search for “outraged” there’s quite a few examples of this formula being used.
I suppose it increases impression time of adverts which means higher price earned for them. I’m not criticising the business accumen.
This pattern happens so often that you’d think people would start to catch on. A story about one person supposedly being “outraged” about something leads to a huge vigorous CJ of folks eager to express their anti-outrage-outrage at the straw man in front of them.
Well, consider the reporter's POV. It's really easy to browse Twitter for 20 minutes and then spend 10 minutes summarizing your findings. Contacting people who have any connection at all to important events and then convincing them to answer your questions about those events might take all day...
Same here. And it's not just based on Twitter posts either. I've seen a depressing number of news articles (especially gaming related ones) which are based on random internet petitions signed by maybe three people.
Anyone can set up an internet petition about anything. The presence of one does not meant there's some gigantic audience clamouring for some game idea/casting idea/etc.
