When technical instability on Twitter Spaces turned the launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s doomed presidential run into a glitchy farce last year, rival Donald Trump seized the opportunity to tell his Truth Social followers that this was a “disaster,” suggesting that DeSantis’s “whole campaign will be a disaster.”
Trump was not wrong about that, but now he’s had his own taste of Spaces dysfunction. Yesterday the former president returned to X to have a Spaces chat with proprietor Elon Musk, and the session was heavily delayed due to technical issues, just as happened to DeSantis.
Musk claimed the delay was caused by a “massive” denial-of-service attack, but sources at the company told The Verge that this almost certainly wasn’t true. Given that the rest of X was working just fine, it’s likely that Spaces was just unable to handle a million people tuning into a high-profile conversation.
Even though he claimed X had “tested the [Spaces] system with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier on Monday, Musk shouldn’t feel embarrassed. Zoom has also gone glitchy when playing host to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign events—though unlike Spaces, Zoom has to process video as well as sound. Harris’s campaign even hailed “breaking Zoom” (with a mere 100,000 people) as cause for celebration.
Not missing a beat, the Harris team was on Trump’s Truth Social yesterday evening, reminding users of his abovementioned comments on the DeSantis event.
Until yesterday, Trump had been almost entirely absent from Twitter/X since early January 2021, when the platform booted him off due to that insurrection stuff. Musk gave him his account back after buying Twitter, but Trump was by that point preoccupied with his own network, and only made one brief return to X in August last year, to show off his mugshot.
However, Trump made 10 X posts and reposts yesterday, and investors in Trump Media & Technology Group—Truth Social’s vehicle—certainly noticed. TMTG’s shares fell 5% yesterday and continued their slide this morning. This makes Trump himself less rich, but the firm's other investors also can’t say they weren’t warned: TMTG said in an April SEC filing that it “may lack any meaningful remedy” if Trump’s focus shifts to another platform.
Yesterday’s Trump-Musk chat was also notable because EU digital chief Thierry Breton used the opportunity to publicly remind Musk of his obligations under the Digital Services Act, the law that the EU recently introduced to govern content on big online platforms. The European Commission has already charged X with violating the DSA by facilitating the spread of disinformation, and Breton’s rather officious open letter made clear that his investigators in the case had noticed Musk’s role in stoking racist riots in the U.K. last week—a relevant issue because Musk's posts could be seen by EU users. (Former Twitter EMEA chief Bruce Daisley reckons Musk should face arrest in the U.K. for his stirring, though current British law probably wouldn’t allow for that.)
During Monday's event, Musk didn’t use the Trump conversation to continue his malign intervention into British politics. He did however respond to Breton’s letter with a Tropic Thunder meme suggesting that the EU commissioner do something obscene with his own face. When Musk told advertisers to do something similar, they mysteriously kept opting to spend their cash elsewhere. As DSA fines can go as high as 6% of global annual revenue—and the law can in theory even lead to a platform’s suspension in the EU—Musk may again be inviting financial harm to X.
More news below. And if you think I’m ever going to pass on an opportunity to remind everyone of that time Musk and Breton stood side by side, with the tech mogul nodding furiously and claiming to agree with “everything” in the DSA, think again.
David Meyer
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