Ron DeSantis, the The Republican governor of Florida, is sure to be trending on Twitter after announcing his run for president in an audio stream on the platform today. He probably didn’t want to see the top hashtag #DeSaster.
Just a few minutes after DeSantis joined the platform’s owner Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces, and before the politician could speak, Musk could be heard saying, “The servers are a little hard.” Then the stream ended abruptly, apparently overwhelmed by about 667,000 listeners, a small number compared to streams on other platforms that are regularly watched by millions.
DeSantis’ appearance is a gamble on a novel presidential campaign tactic and a platform not known for its wide appeal to US voters. This ended up pushing Twitter to the breaking point technically and philosophically.
The company, which had a fifth of its staff when Musk acquired Twitter last year, eventually restarted the audio stream nearly 30 minutes after the scheduled start time. But the event went on to show the ideological blind spots of Musk’s social media project—and its tendency to isolate powerful people, especially those with right-wing views, from “free speech” that claimed the CEO champion.
#DeSaster does not bode well for Musk’s ambitions to expand and strengthen the platform, which he says will one day attract 1 billion users a month. The entrepreneur has repeatedly talked about making Twitter an “everything app” similar to the multifunctional Chinese app WeChat. Twitter is set to host a new show by right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson following his ouster from Fox News, where it regularly attracts more than 3 million viewers.
Today’s glitches show that Twitter is not ready to host such crowds. It doesn’t show much potential as a place to reach a broad swath of the US electorate. Only 20 percent of US adults report they use Twitter, according to a recent Pew Research survey, while 81 percent say they use YouTube and 69 percent Facebook. And even though Musk has talked about making Twitter a global “digital town square,” he’s been wary of content moderation and has invited back accounts banned for offensive content, including the rapper Ye, former Kanye West, and former president Donald Trump.
The DeSantis stream further undermined Musk’s claims to make Twitter a place for the genuine exchange of diverse opinions. The platform is “not just canned speeches and teleprompters,” he boasted, just minutes after DeSantis finished his, well, canned speech, echoing lines from his campaign video.
Musk also reiterated his wish for Twitter to be a place where people with different political views can mingle. “Maybe some minds will change one way or another,” he said. But when the digital floor was opened to questions, they came from a who’s who of right-wing thought leadership and Muskian allies, including entrepreneur turned podcaster David Sacks, who cohosted the event.
They include Covid lockdown skeptic and Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya; libertarian-leaning Republican congressman Thomas Massie; conservative talk show host Steve Deace; conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who campaigned against discussions of race and sexuality in public schools; and former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch.
