I’d wager this is in response to the campaign going around to block every blue checkmark. Elon can’t let his crowd of sycophants feel like they’re being ignored.

The structure of the fediverse (lemmy/kbin/mastodon etc) makes it really difficult for alt-right and troll instances to find a meaningful presence.

Truth Social for example is just a mastodon instance, but everyone immediately defederated (blocked) them, so they have no reach. Hateful ideologies want a large audience on which to inflict their bullshit, and the federated model makes it really easy to cut them off.