Vexed Over X! New York Times Weeps for Lost Blue Checks, Musk’s ‘Free-For-All Hellscape’

First the Wash­ing­ton Post, then the New York Times went after the social media plat­form for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter, one year after tech­no-entre­pre­neur Elon Musk pur­chased it and shone a light on the pre­vi­ous regimes squelch­ing of con­ser­v­a­tive voic­es in favor of lib­er­al “blue checks” and oth­er anoint­ed ones, and pos­si­bly swing­ing the 2020 elec­tion to Demo­c­rat Joe Biden (see “Twit­ter Files”).
Reporters Steven Lee Myers, Stu­art Thomp­son, and Tiffany Hsu col­lab­o­rat­ed on the “inter­ac­tive” online project “The Con­se­quences of Elon Musk’s Own­er­ship of X.” (At least the Times only need­ed three reporters to con­jure up fear and loathing against Musk and X; the Post required four.)
The intro­duc­tion fea­tured three blocks of text inter­spersed among graph­ics, demon­strat­ing this was less a tech­nol­o­gy news sto­ry than an anti-Musk rant:

When Elon Musk bought Twit­ter a year ago, he said he want­ed to cre­ate what he called a “com­mon dig­i­tal town square.”.…“That said,” he wrote, “Twit­ter obvi­ous­ly can­not become a free-for-all hellscape.”.…A year lat­er, accord­ing to study after study, Mr. Musk’s plat­form has become exact­ly that.
Now rebrand­ed as X, the site has …