It was revealed May 23 that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would, with the help of Elon Musk, officially launch his presidential candidacy live on Twitter Spaces. But the announcement didn't go off all that smoothly.
After more than 20 minutes of repeated crashes, Musk closed his first Twitter Space, restarting a second one a few minutes later.
Musk said that, with such a massive amount of people online, the servers were "straining."
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Much of the ensuing conversation -- when it finally got started -- centered around free speech, focusing on Twitter's role in the first amendment compared to so-called "legacy media."
Calling Musk a "free speech advocate," DeSantis thanked the tech billionaire for shelling out the enormous amount of money -- $44 billion -- that was required to purchase Twitter.
"The First Amendment is irrelevant if the government and media are operating in lockstep. Twitter was indeed expensive, but free speech is priceless," Musk said in response. "The amazing thing about Twitter is that there’s really never been a mechanism before where someone could address the nation where anyone who wanted to listen to them could. I think this is a really profound change."
Echoing DeSantis' earlier comments on legacy media and how it maintains a "bubble," Musk went on to explain that it's not just about the truth of an individual article, it's about the narrative.
"Whoever’s deciding [the narrative] is deciding not to talk about other things, whereas, with a public digital town square, it’s possible for the people to choose the narrative," Musk said. "This is a means for people to decide the narrative and which way debate will go, not five editors-in-chiefs."
Musk's first Twitter Spaces had more than 600,000 listeners before it closed; the second one, more than a half-hour into it, capped at less than 300,000.
