‘Disastrous results’: DeSantis presidential campaign launch hits technical difficulties

The launch of the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his desire to run in the 2024 elections, was overshadowed by the technological collapse of Twitter. The struggling platform that the Republican politician chose to use to launch his race for the White House experienced its biggest stress test on Wednesday, with disruptions piling up as more people joined the stream.

The start of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces was promoted by Elon Musk as “groundbreaking” and widely touted as a new frontier for “free speech” in politics. Instead, the results were disastrous.

The event, which marked the first time a major candidate announced his presidential bid on social media, was Twitter’s latest attempt to reach more users and profit amid mounting financial troubles. Since taking over the social network and laying off more than 80% of the staff, Musk’s company has experienced an increase in the number of technical failures and errors.

The struggling system endured its biggest stress test to date during Wednesday’s broadcast, which at 6:20 pm ET had nearly 600,000 listeners tuned in to Spaces, Twitter’s dedicated audio streaming feature.

As the live broadcast began, the audio line experienced feedback, stuttering, and distorted audio. Many users have reported crashing or exiting their Twitter apps when trying to join a stream.

The failures piled up over an agonizing 20 minutes. David Sachs, a Republican donor and friend of Elon Musk, who moderated the audio meeting, managed to insert a few phrases before the broadcast was interrupted. He introduced Musk and praised DeSantis for keeping Florida open during Covid. Then the feed is interrupted again. Once again. Once again.

“We have so many people here that we’re kind of overloading the servers, which is a good sign,” Sachs said, after which Musk stated in the background that he was working on allocating more server capacity. Then the broadcast was interrupted again.

Finally, almost 25 minutes after the scheduled start time, the live broadcast began – with a significantly lower number of listeners than before, approximately 40,000 (later they again exceeded 100,000, but did not reach the initial listening figures). Musk acknowledged that the previous stream “broke the Twitter system” before Sachs awkwardly asked DeSantis if he wanted to make an announcement.

“I am running for President of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” DeSantis said, echoing lines from his video message. “Nothing replaces victory… we must look forward, not backward.”

While acknowledging “technical difficulties,” Sachs asked DeSantis why he chose to run on Twitter rather than on television, to which he responded by praising Musk as “a champion of free speech.”

“What has been done with Twitter is really important for the future of our country,” he said.

Elon Musk positions himself as a “free speech absolutist” and at times joins the right-wing conspiracy theorists and hate speech, writes The Guardian. Having taken over Twitter, he restored the account of Donald Trump and other users who were banned from the platform for violating the rules. Ahead of the 2024 election cycle, Musk tried to position Twitter as a place “where all voices are heard,” promising to host Republican and Democratic candidates at events like today.

But the spectacle of the DeSantis launch proved just how ambitious and potentially implausible that goal remains, as the company constantly faces fears of physical collapse due to a lack of staff and infrastructure support, including the closure of a number of data centers. Musk has already tried to present the technological disaster as a victory for the company, saying that the interest in the broadcast was so great that it “broke the Internet.”