How to Listen to DeSantis’ Presidential Announcement with Elon Musk on Twitter

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida announces he will run for president at 6 p.m. Wednesday during 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, which you can listen here at 6 p.m. with a Twitter account. Mr. Musk, owner of 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: give people a way to converse and listen in rooms focused on specific topics.

Spaces was Twitter’s answer to Clubhouse, a social live-streaming app that grew rapidly during the pandemic after launching in March 2020 and showcased the power of audio platforms. While Twitter once had a live video 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 set up the audio chat room and choose the topic to discuss. Hosts moderate their own spaces and can choose people to talk to or call attendees to ask questions or provide feedback. Some spaces have had tens of thousands of listeners, though most only attract an audience of dozens.

Twitter has never released numbers on the popularity of Spaces. Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, has been a user and fan of the feature. He has often appeared on Spaces to talk about his various activities and to conduct interviews with journalists, including two recently from the BBC and CNBC.

Twitter is still working on Spaces issues. The feature can be buggy and sometimes kick users 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.