P.S. Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain! comes to mind now. In the old days there were "keywords", catchy slogans provided by yellow journalism trying to stir people's emotions and prejudices. The internet just enables everyone to be their own yellow journalist. Ironically I felt it helpful to google  this. The reading of this section reminded me how "the truth" sometimes washes out history-wise, neither the bunkers nor debunkers or even the de-debunkers wins all:

[....] Pulitzer and Hearst are often adduced as the cause of the United States' entry into the Spanish–American War due to sensationalist stories or exaggerations of the terrible conditions in Cuba.[20] However, the vast majority of Americans did not live in New York City, and the decision-makers who did live there probably relied more on staid newspapers like the Times, The Sun, or the Post. James Creelman wrote an anecdote in his memoir that artist Frederic Remingtontelegrammed Hearst to tell him all was quiet in Cuba and "There will be no war." Creelman claimed Hearst responded "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Hearst denied the veracity of the story, and no one has found any evidence of the telegrams existing.[21][22] Historian Emily Erickson states:

Serious historians have dismissed the telegram story as unlikely....The hubris contained in this supposed telegram, however, does reflect the spirit of unabashed self-promotion that was a hallmark of the yellow press and of Hearst in particular.[23]

Hearst became a war hawk after a rebellion broke out in Cuba in 1895. Stories of Cuban virtue and Spanish brutality soon dominated his front page. While the accounts were of dubious accuracy, the newspaper readers of the 19th century did not expect, or necessarily want, his stories to be pure nonfiction. Historian Michael Robertson has said that "Newspaper reporters and readers of the 1890s were much less concerned with distinguishing among fact-based reporting, opinion and literature."[24]

Pulitzer, though lacking Hearst's resources, kept the story on his front page. The yellow press covered the revolution extensively and often inaccurately, but conditions on Cuba were horrific enough [....]

And you know what? This has given me some hope! Why? BECAUSE I used to fear the results of Wikipedia from it's startup days from the start, as just another dangerous spin machine! But guess what--over the years, over the process, they've done damn good! I am often as not pleasantly surprised by the sophistication of entries now.

So maybe there really is something to this blockchain thing? Maybe it will really work out well? 

What i like about it. I bounce around reporters and analysts' feeds and you get to see behind the thought processes of the people you follow as stories are developing. They use it to talk to each other as things are developing, i.e. "how about this, do you think this is related?" or "is this the same thing as he/they did last year?"

I try to stick with those analyst types I think are genuinely just trying to analyze. 

And of course when I run across something that's naughty trashy fun and is truly funny, I am susceptible like anyone else, then it's just infotainment and looking for tribe.

But you can easily avoid the tribal thing with twitter by following individuals you respect and then bounce around to maybe even a few you don't respect as much.

I think it's nearly a totally inefficient waste of time to read on topic there via looking at hashtag, trending, "what news", that's where you fall into the tribe vs. tribe and all the nastiness. (Unless you are looking for that, and sometimes you might be, like with a tv show you just watched, it's fun to read all the quips, for lonely people who watch alone who have no watching partner for whatever reason, it's great.)

It's all how you use it. For example, I find it a great tool for finding news links I've missed from the past. You are of course getting those from the patterns another brain has been seeing after watching for a while. So you have to be careful not to fall into just their narrative of things.On the other hand, seeing that, you learn what their motivations are, if they spin, why they are spinning. 

You mix it up by bouncing around the same people you might read in long form, see what they are saying to/from colleagues, how they think, before they set down that long form piece. Rarely, rarely, even bother to delve into the responses from the masses to their tweets, that's a waste. It's what they tweet to each other and what they retweet from people they respect. It's very similar to what we do here when we exchange info on "In the News", trying to figure out a story. I am beginning to find it enormously helpful and a good source of doing the kind of news junkie thing I like to do, especially as sites like this are becoming less active.

Edit to add: to add to my explanation of fun that can be had for certain topic things, think like one of Richard Day's "live threads". Sometimes quips and repartee are just what you are in the mood for.