Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announces that he will run for president on Wednesday at 18.00 in a conversation with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces, a live audio streaming platform on Twitter where people gather and talk online in real time.
Times reporters will provide analysis throughout the announcement for you to listen to 18.00 with a Twitter account. Mr. Musk, who owns Twitter, shared details Wednesday afternoon about his scheduled interview with Mr. DeSantis.
Twitter launched Spaces in May 2021, becoming one of the first social media platforms to create a dedicated audio streaming feature. The idea was simple: to give people a way to converse and listen in rooms focused on specific topics.
Spaces was Twitter’s answer to Clubhouse, a social livestreaming app that grew rapidly in the pandemic after launching in March 2020, demonstrating the power of audio platforms. While Twitter once had a video live streaming service called Periscope, the wide availability of other video streaming tools led the company to shut it down in 2021 and focus on its audio offering.
Any Twitter user can join a Space, which has hosts who create the audio chat room and choose the topic to be discussed. Hosts moderate their own rooms and can choose people to speak or encourage those in the audience to ask questions or make comments. Some rooms have had tens of thousands of listeners, although most only get an audience of dozens.
Twitter has never published figures on Spaces’ popularity. Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, has been a user and fan of the feature. He has appeared frequently on Spaces to talk about his various businesses and to conduct interviews with journalists, including two recently from the BBC and CNBC.
Twitter is still working out Spaces’ kinks. The feature can be buggy and sometimes kick users out or crash. In December, it stopped working after tens of thousands of users joined an audio chat room to listen to Mr Musk discuss why Twitter had banned several journalists from the social network.
