[aliasEli]

I think a very important reason for Twitter's influence is that it is very easy to include tweets in an article. This saves editorial work. There is no need to paraphrase/extract parts of a longer article and so it mostly avoids the problems around incorrect quotes. It also makes attribution of your sources easier because the tweet is the source itself. Of course, Twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced opinions, but these do not seem to be very popular nowadays.