Social media’s attention-based economy and subsequent design, allegedly, spur mistrust and attacks against media workers. X (formerly “Twitter”) facilitates a discursive climate that is divisive and polarized. Within this context, we present research on platform-afforded tagging practices as infrastructures that enact “subtle” underminings of journalistic authority through piggybacking on benign expressions of press-critique. X does not allow effective “untagging” of oneself from other people’s tweets. We showcase how this creates a material addressability, amplifying harassment. The case zooms in on the repetitive questioning of whether or not BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg was “at the party”, alluding to Partygate, a scandal about meetings held at 10 Downing Street during Covid-19 lockdowns. Repurposing linkages between hashtagged and @-tagged tweets allowed us to map a network of critique that assembles a community of so-called “supercharged critical thinkers”. While the “repetitive drum of suspicion” might seem benign, the tagged tweets, asking whether Kuenssberg was at the party, are embedded within a networked ecology of vitriol and misogyny through hashtags that connect creators to a wider network of distrust. While one can exert some control over tagging by segmenting one’s audience, such options are too rudimentary for journalists who have to fulfill a public role.