Ron DeSantis is the first presidential candidate to make a splash on the social networking site

The November January 6th Axios Blackout: Trump Rejoinds Fox News after Musk Takes Over the Fox News Platform

Musk’s popularity with the GOP could serve as a boon to DeSantis whose poll numbers amongst Republican primary voters have fallen over the last few weeks. A survey by Morning Consult shows Trump taking the GOP primary voters by 38 percent.

Tucker Carlson was a well-known conservative commentator at Fox News. On Tuesday, Axios reported that The Daily Wire was bringing all of its podcasts over to the platform by the end of this month.

Republicans have supported Musk since he took over the company, and they’ve accused social media companies of censoring conservative content. Following the deadly January 6th riot in the US Capitol, Trump’s platform was banned from mainstream platforms. After taking over the company, Musk gave his followers the chance to take a poll on the decision to keep Trump’s account. The people have spoken and they have done so. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted at the time.

Spaces Bounced Like It Was Wrong: When Ron DeSantis Filed for the 2024 Presidential Primary Despite Musk’s Excitement

The DeSantis campaign formally filed for the 2024 presidential race Wednesday afternoon, teeing up an increasingly crowded GOP primary election currently led by former President Donald Trump.

Lindsey Curnutte, a DeSenatis spokesman, confirmed the event to The Verge Tuesday. The company replied with their usual poop emoji auto-reply.

“Musk has cut back on the personnel needed to keep Twitter glitch free. Free Press is an advocacy group for digital rights, and they agree that his reckless management style would bite him just as many are tuning in.

So it’s perhaps not a stunning turn of events that Spaces buckled just as DeSantis was delivering his big news, despite all of Musk’s enthusiasm about the event.

Its staff has been whittled down to just about 10% of what it was before Musk’s acquisition, following mass layoffs and hundreds of others quitting. Outages have become far more common. Overall system bugginess has also become the norm for many users.

During the discussion, Sacks claimed the audience on the Spaces was one of the platform’s largest, but Earnest Wilkins, a former Twitter employee who helped produced Spaces, said: “Lol this isn’t in the top 150 spaces by size in the history of the product.”

Musk promoted a new space that was working, but the audience didn’t jump at the chance. The first space had more than 500,000 people at its peak, while the second had around 150,000 people.

At another point, as Sacks attempted to speak, an echo reverberated his words back to him. “It just keeps crashing, huh?” an unidentified speaker was heard saying, as Musk and his team scrambled to fix the problem.

The start of broadcast was delayed for a few minutes and then it cut out twice. Tech investor David Sacks, who was supposed to introduce the event, could be heard saying: “The servers are melting.”

It was supposed to be a big day fortwitter as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was about to announce his presidential candidacy.

Asked about censorship Wednesday, DeSantis said he would soon be signing a “digital bill of rights” that would ban state and government officials from “colluding” with social media companies.

The Sacks-DeSantis Scenario at a Black Hole: How the Internet Melted the Internet, Not the Space Elon

“Man, I think we melted the internet there,” Sacks said in a separate Space he created with his account after the first one shuttered. “I think it crashed because when you multiply a half million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. But with my meager followership it seems to be working much better.”

As of publication, it’s not entirely clear what went wrong, but Musk (one of the only people to actually speak in the first Space) chalked the problems up to overloaded servers. More than half a million people tuning in just a few minutes before the room ended.

DeSantis eventually did launch his campaign, but the event was mired with problems from the very beginning — and DeSantis didn’t manage to use the initial Space hosted by Musk. When moderator David Sacks, a venture capitalist and former PayPal product lead, first unmuted himself to start the talk, the Space was filled with loud, echoing feedback sounds before quickly going silent. The accounts of Sacks and DeSantis came and went in and out of the initial room, seemingly lying to themselves before they left.