Elon Musk has recognized the potential of “Citizen journalism” to break media monopolies and balance out what he sees as biased coverage of the recent Instagram outage, which is owned by Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META), as well as the botched Twitter space that featured Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
What Happened: The day after the coverage surrounding the Instagram outage, which delayed DeSantis’s announcement for a presidential run in 2024, Twitter space host Mario Nawfal pointed out the “Hypocrisy Of The Mainstream Media.” In his tweet, Nawfal claimed that the media failed to criticize Instagram after its global server outage while highlighting faults that occurred during Musk’s hosting of DeSantis on Twitter Spaces.
Musk acknowledged the power of Citizen journalism on Twitter, which he believes can disrupt monopolies held by select editors who may not appreciate the emergence of this alternative form of media.
On Wednesday, DeSantis encountered significant technical challenges during his announcement for the 2024 Presidential election on Twitter Spaces. The highly anticipated event garnered over half a million listeners but offers subpar connectivity and audio quality, causing delays of more than 20 minutes.
Musk and moderator David Sacks acknowledged the massive number of participants, raising concerns about potential server crashes. As DeSantis and Musk hosted the event, former U.S. President Donald Trump took to his own social media platform, Truth Social, to tease DeSantis’ campaign.
The Instagram outage occurred on Sunday evening when users reported that the app’s feed was frozen, and the website was blank. According to outage tracker DownDetector, users started reporting problems accessing Instagram at around 6 PM ET, and the issue had been resolved by 7:30 PM ET.
Why It’s Important: Musk’s Twitter and Meta’s Instagram have been competing against each other for a long time. Recently, Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter, responded to a report about Meta’s soon-to-launch decentralized text-based social media platform, saying, “Game on!” as part of the battle against Zuckerberg’s potentially competing app.
Find more of Benzinga’s Consumer Tech coverage by following this link.
