I genuinely don't understand why news outlets do this unless it's critical to the story. I've seen good examples of Tweet integration in places like The Intercept, for example, but usually they involve some other facet of the story where the Tweets themselves are consequential to the reporting. It just seems like useless noise when done like this article.
The worst thing to happen to journalism in the past decade is that, somehow, "some random strangers on Twitter said a thing" became an acceptable news story. I think it's worse than useless noise--it almost inevitably implies a broader trend/opinion than the author has the evidence to support.
