Twitter does not seem to be the ideal social network to announce a candidacy and start an electoral campaign and proof of this is the disastrous event that Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida and who is running for the United States elections for 2024, organized ago just a few hours on the platform. Specifically, in a Twitter space that from minute zero began to give problems because, apparently, the high number of users who joined the conversation crashed the servers.
The problems, we reiterate, began from minute zero, when Elon Musk launched the space on Twitter and united DeSantis with the aim of announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. David Sacks, an entrepreneur and former PayPal product manager, was in the session as a moderator.
At the time Sacks started speaking, the users who were present in the space began to hear screeching noisesit states The Verge. Seconds later, the space went dead silent, with accounts Sacks and DeSantis going in and out of the room and turning the microphone on and off, apparently trying to fix the glitches.
Minutes later, Sacks created a new Twitter space to unite DeSantis and start his speech to run for the 2024 United States elections. During the broadcast, the former PayPal executive stated that the first space failed due to the large number of users who were in the room.
“I think it collapsed because when you multiply half a million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates an unprecedented level of scalability. But with my small following it seems to be working much better,” Sacks said. Minutes later, Elon Musk confirmed the rulings due to the high number of people who were online. “I had to switch to David because my account was breaking the system,” he noted.
600,000 people made one of Twitter’s most popular features fail
According to The Verge, 600,000 people were in the Twitter space minutes before the organizers closed the session in which both DeSantis and Elon Musk participated. It is a considerable number of people. However, it is not much larger than other major events from other companies where they do not seem to have had technical difficulties. The aforementioned medium gives as an example the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite held in 2020, where 12 million players simultaneously accessed.
The new Twitter space, which could be carried out normally, It already accumulates 2.6 million connected users, and served so that Elon Musk, who has been in favor of the Republican parties, and DeSantis, a Republican, once again distributed their speech on the apparent freedom of expression. They claimed that social media censors right-wing content. They also lashed out at people who fight for LGBTQ+ rights, calling them a “wake up mob” whose goal is to corrupt the talkative tradition.
Elon Musk, although he has detailed that he will not support any particular candidate, has been in favor of DeSantis starting an electoral campaign through a platform like Twitter. “I think it’s quite innovative that there’s such a major announcement on social media,” she said. It is ironic that this “important announcement” has caused one of the most popular features of the social network to stop working with only a small part of all Twitter users connected.