Trump’s Return to X Marred by Technical Glitches ahead of Musk Interview

The Washington Post / Trisha Thadani, Drew Harwell, Faiz Siddiqui

14:11 JST, August 13, 2024

SAN FRANCISCO – Former president Donald Trump’s much anticipated interview on X with owner Elon Musk was marred by technical errors Monday evening and started more than 40 minutes late as more than a million users tuned into the event, which the platform’s owner said would be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter.”

Trump made a flurry of posts on X earlier in the day ahead of the interview, reviving a social media account that was central to his 2016 election and turbulent presidency but had been dormant since last August. Trump had been banned from the site, then called Twitter, after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Musk restored Trump’s account about a month after purchasing the site in 2022, but Trump largely stayed off the platform in favor of Truth Social, a similar platform in which he owns a majority stake.

The interview was set to be a major moment for both Trump and Musk, giving the former president a much greater audience than he reaches on Truth Social and adding to the entrepreneur’s recent efforts to use his platform to sway the election. The site repeatedly crashed as users attempted to access an audio conversation streamed using X’s Spaces feature.

As hundreds of thousands of users initially waited for the event to start, Musk claimed a “massive DDOS attack on X” was to blame for the delay.

Monday night’s technical problems echo an episode last year when Musk’s site crashed repeatedly as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attempted to launch his presidential campaign using the platform. Musk had previously said he was making preparations to avert a similar outcome this time around.

“Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote Sunday. But Musk had also suggested X might need a little bit of luck. “I hope it works,” he said, followed by a prayer-hands and cry-laughing emoji.

Still, the revival of Trump’s account potentially heralds a new era for the former president’s campaign as he seeks to regain the spotlight from his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. For years, Trump used Twitter as his primary megaphone as he railed against undocumented immigrants, the results of the 2020 election and virtually anyone who crossed him. His postings on Truth Social haven’t garnered the same attention that his tweets once did.

It’s unclear whether or how much Trump will continue using Musk’s platform, but in a campaign email Monday, the former president stated: “I’m back on X for a short time.” A permanent return to the platform by Trump would be a major win for Musk, who has begun to more actively court a right-wing audience to his platform.

Trump could also widen his audience by shifting to the larger platform, where he has more than 88 million followers compared to only 7.5 million on Truth Social. The same campaign ad posted around the same time on both platforms Monday attracted 172,000 likes on X within two hours, compared with less than 9,000 on Truth Social.

Trump’s posts came hours before he is scheduled to join an interview with Musk streamed on X, which the entrepreneur said would be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter.” No leader of a major social media site has actively used their platform to support a presidential candidate, an unprecedented dynamic that has raised alarm among some Democrats, who have accused Musk of tilting X in favor of the former president.

A representative for the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the candidate was offered a similar opportunity to appear on X. In response to a post last week speculating about whether Harris would agree to a similar interview with Musk, he replied “I’m open to it.”

On Monday, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to investigate claims of bias on the platform. A handful of pro-Harris accounts have been labeled as spam or restricted in recent weeks. “Egregious falsehoods and conspiracy theories are becoming commonplace on X,” Nadler wrote. “While we may have significant disagreement over the degree and extent of content moderation, I hope that we can at least agree that enforcement on a major platform like X should be fair to both sides.”

Also on Monday, a top European Union official pointedly warned Musk that his live broadcast with Trump would be subject to the bloc’s sweeping social media law. European Commissioner Thierry Breton in a letter citing the E.U.’s Digital Services Act, directed Musk to take measures to address “the amplification of harmful content,” or face action to “protect EU citizens from serious harm.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino immediately criticized the letter, suggesting that it “patronizes” European citizens and was an “unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the US.” Musk later responded with a profane recommendation for the E.U.

Over about an hour Monday, Trump fired off posts on X that included an attack ad against Harris and a link to his fundraising account. The posts were his first since August 2023, when he posted his mug shot after his surrender and release from an Atlanta jail on charges connected with his attempts to reverse the 2020 election results. Each of Monday’s posts attracted hundreds of millions of likes, replies and other engagements. Trump’s campaign sent out an email alerting its subscribers to his post on X.

Musk, X and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump was banned from the platform after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the months after, he teamed up with former contestants of his show “The Apprentice” to create Truth Social. The social media site, which does not publicly report how many users are on the site, has consistently reported significant losses.

The former president has told people close to him that he wants to stick with Truth Social because he stands to gain from the platform’s success. He owns about 60 percent of its parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which has a public market value of more than $4 billion. The company’s stock price had fallen about 5 percent Monday afternoon.

Trump asked Musk last summer whether the billionaire would be interested in buying Truth Social, but the proposal appears to have gone nowhere. Meanwhile, the former president continued to post on his own social platform Monday, mostly to attack Harris and polls that show him losing ground to the Democratic presidential nominee, accusing them of being “fake” without providing evidence to back up that claim.