Daily Beast reporter Scott Bixby tweeted a video of his text inbox on Monday night: an endless scroll of messages from anonymous numbers that, by 10 p.m., totaled more than 4,000. None of the texts shared by Bixby were personalized; rather they appeared to be spam invitations to various iPhone apps. It’s likely that Bixby’s phone number was leaked and used to sign up for similar services over and over, resulting in the flood. That evening, Bixby had published a story exposing the private Twitter account of Ben Mora, a regional field director for Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Per Bixby’s story, Mora used the account, which reportedly has several thousand followers, to attack Sanders’s Democratic opponents.

Apparently this type of troll is one reporters who cover Sanders have experienced before. “So weird that the exact same thing happened to me the other night after writing a story that Sanders supporters decided they didn’t like,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere. Journalist Andrew Feinberg, a White House correspondent for Breakfast Media, replied to Dovere’s tweet saying “ditto,” adding later, “This is what happens when you write anything remotely critical of Senator Sanders.” In a phone interview, Feinberg told me that after he wrote about Sanders surrogates suggesting foul play in the Iowa caucus debacle, he received messages similar to those sent to Bixby. “I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on,” he said. “I got weird texts asking me to change passwords and stuff…confirming services that I hadn’t signed up for. [It] went on for a couple days after that story.”

As he wrote in the Beast, Bixby received a tip from someone who followed Mora’s private account, who cited the “toxicity” of his tweets. Those included that Pete Buttigieg “is what happens when the therapist botches the conversion”; that Amy Klobuchar resembles “her name: pained, chunky, confused origin/purpose”; that Hillary Clinton should be “catapulted off the planet”; and that Elizabeth Warren is “an adult diaper fetishist,” “looks like shit,” and is a liar for misrepresenting her Native American heritage “to get into Harvard,” all in the semi-ironic tone commonly used in internet humor. (Warren identified herself as “American Indian” on her Texas bar registration card.) In another tweet, Mora urged his followers to Trojan horse their way into the Bloomberg campaign. Sanders 2020 communications director Mike Casca announced on Monday that Mora had been fired from his role over the tweets and stated that his team is “a multiracial, multigenerational campaign for justice where disgusting behavior and ugly personal attacks by our staff will not be tolerated.” (Mora did not respond to the Beast’s request for comment.)

Many Sanders supporters objected to this chain of events. Also on Monday night, Bixby tweeted that “Fans of Bernie Sanders are now crafting fake tweets from me in the hopes of drawing the ire of a South Korean boy band that I’ve never heard of? This is super fun.” A tweet sharing Mora’s Venmo handle was liked thousands of times, and various Sanders-supporting factions spoke out against his firing.

Questions around Sanders supporters’ online behavior have quickly become a subplot of the Democratic primary, highlighted by the New York Times—which described his supporters as “envied and caricatured by rivals who covet such loyalty, feared by Democrats who have faced harassment from his followers, and alternately cherished and gently scolded by the candidate himself”—and Buttigieg, among others. In the past, Sanders’s supporters have highlighted cringey language used by other campaign operatives, as when Joe Biden aide Lindy Li was criticized for sharing a tweet calling Sanders a “self-hating Jew” (she later apologized), and Elizabeth Warren faced backlash after one of her surrogates, Ashlee Marie Preston, was reported to have tweeted racist and homophobic comments, including demanding “Latino and Asian businesses...speak fukn English” and, “Asian hoes act like they wont get karate chopped in they muthafukn throat.” (Preston has said the tweets were the result of a drug addiction and has apologized.)