There are people paying bounties to farms to harass journalists and outspoken private citizens on twitter. They get paid if they can get the target to reply or

There are people paying bounties to farms to harass journalists and outspoken private citizens on twitter. They get paid if they can get the target to reply or block. Additionally, David Brock moved from creating the vast right-wing conspiracies against the Clintons in the 90s to managing a huge budget for managing an organization of online trolls from 2016, to becoming an established part of the Democratic Party contractor pool also being used by the Biden admin. This involves a lot of fake accounts; most are silent retweeting accounts that exist to upvote any belligerent harassment of official enemies, usually slyly amplifying real accounts instead of leading from the front. Lastly, intelligence agencies have invested billions and created entire new departments in order to monitor and manipulate social media by any means necessary. They have direct lines to all major social media companies, with the apparent current exception of twitter. Introduced into the middle of all of this are LLMs, which are starting to make it very easy to fake accounts that reply in a vaguely relevant way (although they answer like LLMs, failing if the tweets they're replying to are too oblique and require context that everybody knows.) Still dominant are the endless fake replies from fake accounts that don't reference the tweets they're replying to at all, but just repeat from a list of four or five insults for years on end. 00s youtube comments were 1000x better. This is the actual rise of the Dead Internet. This seems like the last straw for Taibbi. Musk hasn't had an effect on the harassment problem (and doesn't seem to have a plan) and now is making it harder for him to promote his own outlet. He doesn't need Twitter for visibility. I find it nuts that Musk didn't try to clear this decision with the journalists that he's been publicly associated with through the Twitter Files. Them turning on him would have an outsized effect on Musk's situation and none of them have any particular loyalty to him; they're not on his payroll. edit: all that being said, I could see the Substack contingent turning on Musk, then him immediately announcing that he's hired a new twitter CEO, and eventually an announcement about one of Musk's business having very good luck with a regulation, a decision on the violation a regulation, and/or a new government contract/partnership.