Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis explained why he chose Twitter as the platform for the announcement of his presidential candidacy, saying that his approach to dealing with COVID-19 led him to make decisions based on data rather than following the crowd.
His decision to use the tech platform, however, was not without hiccups. The Twitter Spaces discussion hosted by CEO Elon Musk crashed for about 20 minutes, with the platform unable to handle the more than 600,000 listeners tuning in. Musk later attributed the glitches to “scaling issues” tied to his account.
After the event finally got up and running, the governor touted the platform as a bastion for free speech, the importance of which was made prominent during the pandemic.
“If we can’t have an honest debate in a free country about issues that affect hundreds of millions of people, like lockdowns, then what good is the first amendment at that point?” DeSantis said about the censorship of some viewpoints on social media and legacy media. “Those are precisely the times when we needed to have debate be robust.”
DeSantis applauded Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, telling the CEO, “I think you recognize that you can’t have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that are affecting our civilization.
“The truth was censored repeatedly. And now that Twitter is in the hands of a free speech advocate, [the censorship] would not be able to happen again on this Twitter platform.”
Musk responded to DeSantis’ comments saying his platform is “absolutely committed to free speech and a level playing field and just a vigorous debate.”
DeSantis went on to congratulate Musk on the changes on the social media platform saying, “I think what Twitter is standing for is people should be exposed to different viewpoints. I think the elites in our society have tried to cluster themselves to where their assumptions are never challenged, and that’s not a good way, I think, to live.
“It’s also not a good way to be a critical thinker because no one’s ever gonna question obviously wrong assumptions because everybody around you shares it.”
Musk echoed similar sentiments voicing some of his reasoning for buying Twitter, saying “It’s not just whether the media reports if an article is true or not. Even more powerful is deciding what the narrative is.
“Whereas with a digital town square, it’s possible for the public to choose the narrative and empowers the people, instead of a very tiny elite cabal.”
In DeSantis’s campaign launch remarks, he positioned himself as the candidate who could “restore sanity” to the United States and end the “culture of losing” he said had infected the Republican Party in recent years.
“I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” he told Musk.
Musk ended the hourlong discussion with DeSantis by inviting other candidates to join a conversation on the platform.
