Elon Musk praised the power of “Citizen journalism” in breaking media monopolies, highlighting its significance amidst supposed contrasting coverage of the recent Instagram, owned by Meta Platforms Inc. META outage and a botched Twitter Space involving Ron DeSantis.
What Happened: On Thursday, after the massive reporting on Musk-owned microblogging site’s glitches delaying Florida Governor DeSantis’s announcement for the 2024 Presidential run was done, a Twitter space host, Mario Nawfal, pointed out the “Hypocrisy Of The Mainstream Media.”
See Also: Elon Musk’s Twitter Community Notes Also Have Inaccuracies … And Netizens Have So Many Questions
In his long format tweet, Nawfal argued that “three days ago,” Instagram experienced a “worldwide server outage” but didn’t face any criticism and “almost went unnoticed.” In contrast, technical issues arose when Musk was making “history by hosting DeSantis on a Twitter Space to announce his presidential run,” the media started targeting the platform.
The tech billionaire responded to his tweet, saying “Citizen journalism” on Twitter disrupts the “monopoly” held by a select few editors, who may not appreciate the emergence of this alternative form of media.
For the unversed, on Wednesday, DeSantis encountered significant technical challenges during his announcement for the 2024 Presidential election on the microblogging site, as the highly anticipated Twitter Spaces event suffered from audio and connectivity issues. This resulted in a more than 20-minute delay.
Musk and moderator David Sacks acknowledged the overwhelming number of participants, expressing concerns about potential server crashes, as the event attracted over half a million listeners.
Seizing this moment, former U.S. President Donald Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social and mocked his DeSantis’ campaign.
The Instagram outage Nawfal mentioned occurred on Sunday evening as users reported that the app’s feed was frozen and the website was blank. According to outage tracker DownDetector, users started reporting the troubles with 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 pitched against each other for a long time.
Previously, Musk, who acquired Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, mocked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for considering launching a Twitter rival and called him a “copy cat.”
Recently, Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter, also responded to a report about Meta’s soon-to-launch decentralized text-based social media platform, saying, “Game on!”
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