Well, in part because the your comment is questioning news practices. The point of scare quotes is to signal irony, uncertainty, or skepticism. Your very next s

Well, in part because the your comment is questioning news practices. The point of scare quotes is to signal irony, uncertainty, or skepticism. Your very next sentence implicitly questions the "news popularization" of swatting as something that leads to the target's death on the basis of its greater "newsworthiness" vs. incidents leading to psychological trauma. That, and because you were not actually quoting anyone or anything specific. When quotation marks are used in a questioning context and the text being quoted is not an actual quote, the assumption is scare quotes. The writer is trying to draw attention to the language rather than actually quote someone's words.