Last night’s Presidential campaign announcement by Ron DeSantis on Elon Musk’s “Twitter Spaces” was a hot mess. DeSantis, generations younger than Trump, no doubt thought social media was a cooler platform than descending a golden staircase.
But neither Musk nor DeSantis have much of what anyone could call a personality. And that was the campaign announcement’s first problem.
Musk also didn’t do Twitter any favors by showcasing his fragile, audio-only streaming platform, which crashed after only moderate demand. The “failure to launch” soon acquired its own hashtag: #DeSaster. Nevertheless, DeSantis supporters turned the technical disaster into a talking point – it crashed, they explained, because so many people love Ron and wanted to hear him that he just broke the Internet.
Like DeSantis, Musk too seems impervious to his own disasters. Not content to injure employees, kill people with his Tesla auto-pilot feature, or blow up his own spaceships, Musk acquired Twitter only to become the new Julius Streicher of social media and begin running the platform into the ground.
Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has re-platformed most of the Nazis and white supremacists who had previously run afoul of Twitter’s common decency standards, banned developers of the third party apps that made Twitter so popular and useful, abused his employees, tried gouging users with “verification” fees, caused half his advertisers to abandon the platform, and turned general incivility on Twitter into a riotous cesspool of hate.
So much so that Twitter is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from Parler, Gab, Telegram, or Truth Social. Whether out of disgust or principle, organizations, celebrities, politicians and ordinary people have started moving their Twitter accounts to Mastodon, BlueSky, Post.News, and elsewhere.
By now everyone is familiar with the political stunts of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, as well as the many pieces of authoritarian and White Christian-nationalist themed legislation he has signed. Needless to say, a Mussolini wannabe like DeSantis and a Nazi admirer like Musk are birds of a feather. And so were the few speakers permitted to join DeSantis’s campaign event.
DeSantis and Musk were joined by: Christopher Rufo, an evolution denier and enemy of critical race theory (which he claims is being taught to kindergartners); Jay Bhattacharya, signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting COVID run rampant to kill a certain percent of the population; Steve Deace, a Born-Again Blaze Media talk show host and election denier; Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican whose 2021 Christmas card depicted his whole family pointing assault rifles at the camera; Laura Ingraham, recently fired FOX hostess and white supremacist; Nate Silver, a well-known pollster who will soon be signing off fivethirtyeight.com and should have known better; Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympian, FOX News correspondent, and weirdly a MAGA trans woman who hates trans people; and Megyn Kelly, a former FOX News anchor.
So in case Twitter users hadn’t noticed before, Twitter is now another far-right platform. Last night’s campaign event, hosted by Musk himself, ought to dispel the last doubt. Progressive organizations still maintaining a Twitter account really need to do some soul-searching. Get out, get off, find something else.
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