Ron DeSantis Makes The Mistake Of Launching His Presidential Campaign On Twitter
Ron DeSantis is seen as a frontrunner for the Republican nomination to become President of the United States. And he decided to launch his bid for The White House on Twitter with is “friend” Elon Musk.
Bad move Ron. Here’s why:
The start of a much-anticipated Twitter event in which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis planned to announce his 2024 Republican presidential bid was repeatedly disrupted Wednesday when Twitter’s servers apparently could not handle the surge in traffic.
The app crashed repeatedly as Twitter users tried to listen to the event where Twitter owner Elon Musk joined DeSantis for the announcement.
DeSantis eventually was able to speak, about 20 minutes after the scheduled start, after Musk closed the initial Twitter Spaces event and started a second one on the app. That space attracted about 161,000 users, according to Twitter’s public-facing data, as DeSantis read a short speech.
And:
Voices early in the Twitter Spaces event were openly concerned Trump would take advantage of the early glitches, a notable admission because the event was set up by DeSantis supporters.’
“This is going to be a stain that Trump is going to leverage for at least a few weeks,” one person could be heard saying amid the event’s early glitches.
As the first Twitter Spaces event kicked off, metrics published by Twitter indicated that more than 600,000 were attempting to listen.
“We’ve got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers,” Sacks said at one point.
“We’re reallocating some of the server capability to be able to handle the load here. It’s really going crazy,” Musk said.
By the time DeSantis got the moment his political team had spent weeks negotiating, there were fewer than 70,000 viewers remaining, a significantly smaller audience than is traditional for a major presidential campaign launch.
That’s a #fail. But the bad news doesn’t end there:
Trump aides and allies immediately — and gleefully — mocked the Florida governor for the initial tech fiasco.
“Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!” Steven Cheung, spokesman for former President Donald Trump’s campaign, told NBC News.
President Joe Biden’s Twitter account posted a link to his own fundraising page, writing, “This link works.”
You have to think that Elon must be embarrassed that such a high profile event caused Twitter to pretty much implode. It illustrates just how badly Elon is running Twitter at the moment. And should serve as a warning to anyone who wants to do a high profile event to not do it on Twitter. Meanwhile, I am sure a bunch of Twitter employees who were fired by Elon in the early days of his takeover of Twitter are laughing at Elon because of this embarrassing situation. Sucks to be Elon.
May 26, 2023 at 8:08 am
[…] At some point Elon is going to get called on this. Likely by the EU who has rules about this sort of thing. But Twitter has other issues at the moment. As in news that the head of engineering at Twitter has resigned following the debacle related to Ron DeSantis launching his bid for The White House on Twitter, and that turning into a train wreck next to a dumpster fire: […]