Is Twitter the new Fox?

Last week, Twitter hosted a live interview with Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who used the platform’s audio feature, known as Twitter Spaces, to launch his presidential campaign. Instead of being a triumph for both the company and DeSantis, the event was an unmitigated disaster: the first twenty minutes or so were mostly dead air—punctuated by occasional comments from Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, who was to interview DeSantis alongside David Sacks, an investor and DeSantis donor—before the Space restarted with what appeared to be a dramatically smaller number of listeners.

Glitches aside, some observers saw the event as the latest in a series of moves, on Twitter’s part, to position itself as the network of choice for the American right—the most significant of which arguably came last month, when Tucker Carlson announced that he would bring his show to the platform.

Even if Twitter could become a new right-wing media powerhouse, would that be a worthwhile strategy for the company? Warzel isn’t so sure. Fox News has been able to profit from television advertising revenue and cable carriage fees—avenues that are not open to Twitter (which, under Musk, has actually lost many of its own advertisers). Right-wing platforms may attract investors and even new users, Warzel argues, but “they are, ultimately, bad businesses,” since what fuels far-right discourse is the chance to make fun of the left, and if there are no left-leaning users on Twitter anymore, then it won’t be as appealing.

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