When technical instability on Twitter Spaces turned the launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s doomed presidential run into a glitchy farce last year, rival Donald Trump seized the opportunity to tell his Truth Social followers that this was a “disaster,” suggesting that DeSantis’s “whole campaign will be a disaster.”
Trump was not wrong about that, but now he’s had his own taste of Spaces dysfunction. Yesterday the former president returned to X to have a Spaces chat with proprietor Elon Musk, and the session was heavily delayed due to technical issues, just as happened to DeSantis.
Musk claimed the delay was caused by a “massive” denial-of-service attack, but sources at the company told The Verge that this almost certainly wasn’t true. Given that the rest of X was working just fine, it’s likely that Spaces was just unable to handle a million people tuning into a high-profile conversation.
Even though he claimed X had “tested the [Spaces] system with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier on Monday, Musk shouldn’t feel embarrassed. Zoom has also gone glitchy when playing host to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign events—though unlike Spaces, Zoom has to process video as well as sound. Harris’s campaign even hailed “breaking Zoom” (with a mere 100,000 people) as cause for celebration.
Not missing a beat, the Harris team was on Trump’s Truth Social yesterday evening, reminding users of his abovementioned comments on the DeSantis event.
Until yesterday, Trump had been almost entirely absent from Twitter/X since early January 2021, when the platform booted him off due to that insurrection stuff. Musk gave him his account back after buying Twitter, but Trump was by that point preoccupied with his own network, and only made one brief return to X in August last year, to show off his mugshot.
However, Trump made 10 X posts and reposts yesterday, and investors in Trump Media & Technology Group—Truth Social’s vehicle—certainly noticed. TMTG’s shares fell 5% yesterday and continued their slide this morning. This makes Trump himself less rich, but the firm’s other investors also can’t say they weren’t warned: TMTG said in an April SEC filing that it “may lack any meaningful remedy” if Trump’s focus shifts to another platform.
Yesterday’s Trump-Musk chat was also notable because EU digital chief Thierry Breton used the opportunity to publicly remind Musk of his obligations under the Digital Services Act, the law that the EU recently introduced to govern content on big online platforms. The European Commission has already charged X with violating the DSA by facilitating the spread of disinformation, and Breton’s rather officious open letter made clear that his investigators in the case had noticed Musk’s role in stoking racist riots in the U.K. last week—a relevant issue because Musk’s posts could be seen by EU users. (Former Twitter EMEA chief Bruce Daisley reckons Musk should face arrest in the U.K. for his stirring, though current British law probably wouldn’t allow for that.)
During Monday’s event, Musk didn’t use the Trump conversation to continue his malign intervention into British politics. He did however respond to Breton’s letter with a Tropic Thunder meme suggesting that the EU commissioner do something obscene with his own face. When Musk told advertisers to do something similar, they mysteriously kept opting to spend their cash elsewhere. As DSA fines can go as high as 6% of global annual revenue—and the law can in theory even lead to a platform’s suspension in the EU—Musk may again be inviting financial harm to X.
More news below. And if you think I’m ever going to pass on an opportunity to remind everyone of that time Musk and Breton stood side by side, with the tech mogul nodding furiously and claiming to agree with “everything” in the DSA, think again.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Apple antitrust in India. A long-running antitrust case against Apple has taken a peculiar turn, after the country’s competition regulator took the rare step of recalling the reports it had issued that said the tech giant had broken the law. As Reuters reports, Apple had complained that the reports, given to its opponents in the case, disclosed commercial secrets—Indian revenue and market share figures, a source told the news agency. Now those opponents, including Match, must give the reports back. The antitrust body reportedly found that Apple exploited its iOS app store monopoly by limiting developers to its own in-app purchase system, but now the case will continue. Which leads us to…
Apple vs. Patreon. Apple has forced Patreon to use its iOS in-app purchase system, under threat of removing it from the App Store if it refuses to comply. This means Apple will add a 30% fee to new Patreon memberships purchased through the platform’s iOS app, Patreon explained in a blog post. It’s unclear exactly why Patreon has been able to skirt these Apple requirements until now, TechCrunch reports.
Russia loses AdSense. Google has told Russian YouTubers and web publishers that it’s deactivating their AdSense accounts. As Bleeping Computer notes, Google and YouTube ads have been disabled in Russia since shortly after the country’s full-on invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, but some Russian creators have continued to monetize traffic coming from outside the country. Now, Google says “ongoing developments in Russia” mean it won’t be able to continue making payments to those people.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
60%
—The boost in U.K. activity that X rival Bluesky claims to have received in recent days, after Musk’s divisive and misleading comments about the country’s racist riots. The platform told Reuters that several British lawmakers, who typically use X quite heavily, have now decamped to Bluesky.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Uber CEO snubs Elon Musk’s vision of a $30,000 payday for Tesla owners who rent out their cars as self-driving taxis, by Sydney Lake
World’s biggest hacker fest spotlights AI’s soaring importance in the high-stakes cybersecurity war—and its vulnerability, by Sharon Goldman
‘Why do I need AI in my coffee maker?’ AI-labeled products can scare away customers, study finds, by Sasha Rogelberg
Meet the Harvard dropout who made an AI necklace he says is like ‘talking to God’, by Eva Roytburg
Progressive Instagram accounts saw 65% less reach after Meta curbed political content, by Bloomberg
BEFORE YOU GO
Labor and chips. The AI boom involves ever-greater numbers of chips, but scaling up production may require more than cash. As the Financial Times reports, there’s a huge mismatch between the number of job openings being created by the U.S. chip sector’s rapid expansion and the number of engineers and technicians who are available to fill them. “Chip plants require highly skilled employees, with master’s and doctoral degrees in science and engineering, to run them. Even the construction of a chip fabrication plant itself requires specialist workers,” the article notes. “For the chip sector, the jobs-workers gap is becoming dangerously wide.”
