They previously had a team whose sole job was to respond to requests like this. If they no longer exist and the company relies solely on Musk being interested enough to respond, media outlets will never get a response before the article runs. It's bad for Twitter, bad for the article, bad for the readers. Even if it's just PR speak, it's still a response that can be analyzed by the other two parties in the story (the author and the reader).

The primary purpose of communications departments is to coordinate a uniform corporate messaging. Particularly when there's a negative story coming out, the communications department is going to be the one trying to explain away the negativity, and is likely to be more competent at talking its way out of situation than an individual is likely to be (see also the former CEO of FTX, who has more or less been confessing to fraud online in trying to explain his way out of the situation).

Given that a social media company is almost invariably going to be caught in complicated negative stories like "$PLATFORM was found being used to coordinate genocide against Rohingyas in Myanmar" or "$TERRORIST posted manifesto on $PLATFORM before $TERRORIST_EVENT", not having anyone available to officially comment on those kinds of stories is... not a good idea. Even worse would be if you decide to let a shitposter be the point man...

The "media middlemen" still are writing their articles. With a working communications department, you get ahead info on articles (maybe not all details from the article, but a heads up) and a chance to incluence the articles by providing input to the author. Without a communication department article authors rely stronger on other sources.

> Twitter can communicate to people directly

But they're not, which is why this information is being reported by the media. And the media has questions which Twitter hasn't addressed, and those questions are going unanswered because Twitter no longer employs the people that answer those questions.

Moreover, the "media middlemen" that you're describing are also looking at this from the perspective of the Twitter employees (and former employees). Do you really expect Twitter (the nebulous entity which communicates directly to people, as you imply) to reflect accurately on what their employees have to say? Of course not. If it was up to Twitter, none of this would be reported on and the public would be no wiser. These journalists are reporting information that wouldn't be reported otherwise; they _obviously_ add value beyond being middlemen, because there seems to be nobody to be a middleman _for_.

>Twitter can communicate to people directly

Who is Twitter?

Lol, who is doing the communicating?

I haven't met a single defender of Musk that has the slightest inkling of business or tech, and this is a great example.

You want to have random engineers talking to the press through their Twitter accounts? Sounds great! Especially if there's no way to tell who actually even works at Twitter because verification is now purchased for a tiny amount of money, rather than reflecting any sort of trust based verification.

Or a payroll department. Good luck retaining any remaining employees if you can't pay them. And good luck hiring new payroll employees who will want to deal with the inevitable lawsuits in multiple countries about the firings, layoffs, and unpaid severance.