i can't even guess as to why they went quiet. not one guess at all. we will never know.
edit: well they're not quiet now once they get called out
On this platform specifically we've had months of smug people claiming to make the moral choice of directly or indirectly supporting the clearly worse choice. It's far too early to just let that slide.
If we in 100 years still sometimes talk about the early days of the fediverse where a bunch of morons fell for astroturfing, that's kind of a good outcome.
If they're real people they should feel bad.
For the not so real people, we should figure out how a distibuted system can deal with a concerted astroturfing operation.