DeSantis/Musk event didn’t break the Internet, but it did break Twitter
Enlarge / Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (credit: Scott Olson / Staff | Getty Images North America)
Yesterday, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis became the first presidential hopeful to announce his campaign on Twitter Spaces, which Elon Musk had touted as a "smart move" for "any candidate" to "get the highest possible audience."
But instead of making sure that DeSantis' announcement was delivered to the broadest possible audience, Twitter glitched for nearly 30 minutes, causing more than half of DeSantis' initial 600,000-strong audience to ditch the audio session, briefly including DeSantis himself, The Washington Post reported. In the end, only 161,000 users heard DeSantis deliver his short speech, NBC News reported, with a total of approximately 300,000 users ultimately attending the audio-only event, which lasted more than an hour.
A screenshot widely shared from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" showed that the number represented fewer viewers than videos of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got playing a game on Twitch, Buzzfeed got exploding a watermelon, and April the Giraffe got giving birth.
