This is less of a problem to me than the other side effect of like-driven journalism. If you only preach to the choir, you can get away with misleading or inaccurate claims. Like-driven journalism encourages a style where you present only some of the facts or even just make stuff up. Folks like stuff because of what it says. They don't care if it's partial truths or lies. Like-driven journalism quite literally punishes honesty.
This gets to the heart of the problem and is even understated. If your audience is partisan, going against what they want to hear by providing nuance, context, or even straight news, can provoke extreme outrage. Perhaps people will recall when the NYT had to change a factually correct headline because it wasn't sufficiently critical of the previous president.
That's a very good point - I feel very uncomfortable on Twitter even today, but I can see how a "words first" education would make it easier to cope with.
It doesn't remove the issue though, since the space is so limited - IMHO Twitter is instead a much more fitting space for poets...
The best part is the reward of lying for "journalists".
If you lie and get caught, ignore it.
If the person who called you out has too much of a following to ignore, then just write a small sentence at the bottom clarifying how you're not lying, you just interpreted things different.
They still won't go away? Find one of their followers who makes a comment that's just a bit out of line. Can't find one? Well a Twitter account is free to make. Boom, the story is now how your critic is inciting violence, sexist, racist, probably voted for Trump, and insurrectionist, a climate change denier, white supremacist, transphobe, etc. That's the story now and you're the victim at the center of it all.
And the people employing these "journalists" don't just shield them from consequence, they reward them for it.
