On Wednesday evening, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) introduced his 2024 bid for the GOP nomination for president in a Twitter livestream that was marred by glitches and technical difficulties.
The primary-of-its-kind occasion, which was overrated by each DeSantis and Twitter proprietor Elon Musk, was extensively panned by political and media observers.
Musk, together with tech entrepreneur David Sacks, hosted the livestream on Twitter Areas, a nook of the positioning the place customers can host audio-only broadcasts. Musk and Sacks had been slated to briefly talk about the presidential race after which introduce DeSantis, however DeSantis didn’t get a chance to speak for nearly the first half hour of the program resulting from technical difficulties.
Sound incessantly reduce out and in through the first a part of the occasion. The glitches had been so unhealthy that Musk and Sacks had been pressured to cease and restart the occasion, reportedly dropping the variety of listeners in half, from 500,000 when it initially started to 250,000 when it resumed.
The drop in listeners meant that a whole lot of hundreds of customers who had meant to listen to DeSantis announce his run — an motion that usually entails nice fanfare — missed the reside broadcast.
“It was daring. It turned out to be a mistake,” radio host Erick-Woods Erickson said to his followers on Substack. “It’s recoverable. However it’s a reminder that some issues must be below full management of the candidate, significantly the launch day.”
Sacks tried to play off the glitches and delays by claiming they had been a results of the occasion’s reputation.
“I believe you broke the web there,” Sacks said when this system began for the second time.
“ you’re breaking new floor when there’s bugs and scaling points,” he added in a while.
However observers of the social media web site have famous that these glitches are usually not an anomaly, and that Twitter outages have been extra frequent since Musk’s takeover of the site last year. As proprietor of Twitter, Musk has loosened restrictions on what content material could be shared — prompting a flood of hateful posts from far right users — and fired 75 p.c of employees on the firm.
Musk appeared to acknowledge the glitches throughout this system. “That was insane, sorry,” he told users after the restart.
Within the lead-up to Wednesday’s Twitter Areas occasion, nameless Twitter workers instructed The New York Instances that they were concerned over whether Twitter could even support the increase in traffic that was anticipated for DeSantis’s marketing campaign announcement. No planning had been made to account for “web site reliability points” earlier than the occasion occurred, they stated.
“The technical issues on Wednesday confirmed how Twitter is working removed from seamlessly, turning what was speculated to be a crowning occasion for Mr. Musk into one thing of a humiliation,” New York Times technology reporter Ryan Mac wrote.
Even earlier than the printed aired, the occasion was muddled in controversy. Though Musk falsely purports to be politically impartial, he has shifted the positioning rightward, publicly mocking progressives and propping up far proper figures in his tweets. Final yr, Musk indicated that he would support DeSantis for president in 2024.
DeSantis is decidedly far proper, with critics denouncing his relentless assaults on marginalized populations in Florida as “proto-fascist.”
Below the supposed auspices of “freedom,” DeSantis has attacked the “civil rights of ladies, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, academics, college students, labor unions, and extra,” Truthout reporter Mike Ludwig famous.
As Florida governor, DeSantis has signed a dangerous six-week abortion ban into law; denied college students their civil rights by signing a regulation that permits mother and father and group members to censor books they deem inappropriate (typically focusing on books with LGBTQ and/or Black characters); and enacted inhumane anti-immigrant insurance policies, even transporting migrants to different states in a merciless political stunt that seems to be unlawful.
“DeSantis’s lies, insurance policies and embrace of historic revisionism can’t be separated from both an egregious fascist historical past or the present makes an attempt by the GOP to erase migrants and Black and Brown folks from historical past with a view to prop up a white nationalist agenda,” Henry A. Giroux, the present McMaster College Chair for Scholarship within the Public Curiosity within the English and Cultural Research Division and a member of Truthout’s board of administrators, famous in an op-ed in December 2022.
“There’s little doubt that DeSantis has turned Florida right into a laboratory of fascist politics,” Giroux added. “Politicians and students alike, together with Robert Reich (former secretary of the treasury from the Clinton administration) and the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, have labeled DeSantis a fascist, and they’re proper.”
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