This has little to do with the bot, and everything with this being the heyday of Twitter shitstorms; we didn't have any social immunity to people getting offended about random things on-line, and others getting recursively offended, and then "adults" in news publishing treating that seriously and converting random Twitter pileups into stock movements.

In a decade since then, things got marginally better, and such events wouldn't play out so fast and so intensely in 2026.