The recent Twitter Spaces event featuring Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis highlighted the limitations of social media as a hub for public discourse and political campaigns. Musk’s owning of Twitter was driven by his desire to challenge the groupthink of liberal institutions, but his attempts to make Twitter a hub for discourse, news gathering and entertainment were overestimated. Twitter is an influential platform, but it is still downstream of other institutions such as universities, newspapers, television channels, movie studios, and other internet platforms. Musk’s difficulties as the CEO of Twitter reflected an overestimation of its inherent authority and influence. For Twitter to be the world’s news hub or to host presidential candidates, it needs a professional newsroom or channel, respectively. DeSantis launched his presidential campaign via Twitter Spaces, which may have been a trap for him as it made him appear unnecessarily small. He would be wise to focus on his claim of better governance through his advantage in flesh-pressing and campaign-trail-hitting energy rather than relying solely on social media. On the other hand, for Musk to escape this trap, he needs to admit defeat or innovate by building a Twitter infrastructure that would make it bigger than he imagined it could be.
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