Jack do you think that there could be a coordinated attack on Twitter via scraping? I don't know enough about any of this but it just made me think of a DNS attack.
Discussion
It's more likely that this behavior has been going on for a while, doesn't even vost that much but elon just doesn't want to pay for it , and it's part of his war against Open Ai. Especially since the cost of making it walled off, losing usefulness, is greater.
It could also be a marketing thing. Keep twitter exclusive, desired, elite.