Elon Musk wants to erase the bad memory of his show with Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.
The hopeful candidate decided on May 24 to announce his presidential candidacy on Twitter, as part of an interview with the billionaire. The move was an unorthodox choice and was meant to position DeSantis as an independent and introduce him to Musk’s 140 million Twitter followers.
These followers are, for some, the billionaire fans who idolize him. They do not tolerate any negative criticism of their hero and attack any article so unfavorable to the King of Techno as Tesla is known (TSLA) – Get a free report.
Since acquiring Twitter in October for $44 billion and deciding to make it a bulwark of free speech, a platform where anything can be said as long as it doesn’t break the law, Musk has also become the champion of conservatives in the new culture war against the “virus of the awakened mind,” that is, progressive values. .
Musk wants to change the narrative
The problem is that not everything went as planned. The tech mogul believes DeSantis’ ad will go down in social media history. While the interview may have made history for the platform, it is often remembered on the negative side. The conversation, which was a live Twitter Spaces audio, started about half an hour late due to technical issues. These glitches turned off hundreds of thousands of people who initially paid attention, so when the technical issues were settled, fewer than 300,000 Twitter users followed the exchange between the two men. The media coverage was vicious and unanimous: It was a fiasco, which also brought to mind some of Musk’s controversial decisions, like firing more than 69% of Twitter’s employees.
This failure seems personal to Musk, who is used to impressing the world. In the hours that followed, he tried to downplay the issues by saying the event had received “tremendous attention” and Twitter had a record number of sign-ups, but critics weren’t convinced. The failed interview even gave political experts reason to conclude that DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald Trump in the polls for the Republican nomination, had complicated the task a bit more and would now have to climb Mount Everest to reverse the trend.
Musk did not give up. The billionaire wants to change the narrative surrounding this event at any cost. He seems ready to make use of any argument even if it means exaggerating the facts. That’s what he just did with the fundraising numbers DeSantis’ campaign announced. The problem is that Musk has been debugged by Community Notes, a kind of fact-checking system he created on Twitter.
the billionaire said on May 26, with a link to a CBS story saying DeSantis raised “$8.2 million in the first 24 hours” after launching his presidential campaign. “But what’s not noise? Setting a fundraising record!”
Then he encouraged organizations and other presidential candidates to look to Twitter for their big news: “It’s worth looking at ads in general,” Musk said.
He won’t let his critics write the story
The billionaire was instantly corrected by community feedback, his weapon against inaccurate facts and misleading tweets.
“This tweet is factually incorrect,” the fact-checking program, which allows users to add context to tweets in order to maintain content quality and reduce misinformation on the platform, flagged in Musk’s post. “Trump raised $25 million in 2019. To remove major donors, it’s still $14 million.”
She continued, “Moreover, half of Gov. DeSantis’ donations came via a donor event that started prior to space. President Joe Biden raised $6.3 million, surpassing DeSantis’ online donations.”
The correction is a major setback for Musk in that it deals a major blow to his willingness to change the narrative. But the billionaire’s tweet shows just how far he’s willing to go to erase one of his biggest failures. It also indicates that Musk does not want to let his detractors and detractors write the story. The techno king saw the interview as the culmination of his accomplishments as the kingmaker of American politics, a kind of rival to media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox empire serves as a road down which any conservative politician seeking to assert himself must go. in the previous few years.
The billionaire is also keen to erase the narrative that by lending to DeSantis platform, he has politicized Twitter. He aligned the social network with a political party candidate, officially making the platform a party social network. Most social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok, do everything to avoid supporting politicians. They often limit themselves to initiatives such as encouraging their users to vote, but they do not officially promote a candidate.