"This argument would make a lot more sense if people actually gave a shit what TechCrunch or CNN had to say"

The only requirement is a sound argument. The source is an unimportant detail.

This is a very strange conspiratorial kind of ad hominem fallacy that makes no attack on the 'sense' of the argument nor addresses it in any way...

No, the argument I was replying to was basically that the constant disparaging of Twitter in media outlets will be psychological "death by a thousand cuts" to their branding. I'm saying that the result will be the opposite of that, almost like a streisand effect, because in general, people do not trust the media. When the media pushes a story, the natural inclination for many is to dig their heels into a position contrary to the media's agenda they infer from the reporting.

For example, the more CNN reported about COVID and Vaccines, the less likely the already vaccine hesitant were to get one.

Obviously for contentious topics you need to modulate this based on how politicized it is and which media outlet is reporting the negative stories about Twitter, or whichever topic some side has an agenda against. In this case, the people who are fans of Musk are almost exclusively people who oppose the outlets that have been posting negative stories about Twitter.

If Fox News, NYPost, or CoinMarketCap were posting negative stories about Twitter, then GP may have a point - the stories would eventually inflict damage to the brand. But as it stands today, the only outlets crusading against Twitter are the same outlets fervently opposed by most Twitter supporters, so the negative coverage will only make Twitter more endearing to them. Anyone more agreeable to those outlets probably already dislikes Twitter/Musk, so the negative branding effect will be mostly negligible.