The new Elon Musk-owned version of Twitter helped Ron DeSantis launch his bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday.

Though it was marred by technical glitches and skewered by the candidate’s critics, the forum nevertheless underscored Twitter’s unmistakable shift to the right under Musk, who bought it for $44 billion and took over in October.

“The truth was censored repeatedly, and now that Twitter is in the hands of a free speech advocate, that would not be able to happen again on this Twitter platform,” Mr DeSantis said during the Twitter Spaces event.

“You can call me whatever you want just make sure you call me a winner because that’s what we’ve done in the state of Florida — and that’s exactly what we would do nationally, not only in the election but actually bringing all these great policies to bear” he said, without mentioning Mr Trump by name, in an interview with Fox News.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has said that Donald Trump’s slew of attacks directed at him after he announced his bid for presidency shows that the former president knows that he can beat him.

“I think a lot of what he’s doing is showing everyone that he understands that I’ve got a good chance to beat him, because he doesn’t criticise anybody else now. It’s only me,” Mr DeSantis said in an interview with host Jack Heath on “The Pulse of New Hampshire”, reported Fox News.

“They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t think that I had chance because I think they realize that I am offering folks a record of achievement that’s second to none.”

John Bowden profiles the highest-profile Republican seeking to dethrone Donald Trump.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has sought to push past an embarrassing beginning to his presidential campaign, outlining an aggressive travel schedule as his allies insisted they remain well funded and well positioned for a long Republican primary fight ahead.

While DeSantis supporters privately acknowledged the bungled announcement was an unwelcome distraction, there was a broad sense — even among some Republican critics — that it would likely have limited long-term political consequences, if any at all.

Eric Garcia and Andrew Feinberg write:

He’s a ubiquitous presence in conservative media with a reputation as an anti-woke warrior who has used a compliant state legislature to make Florida a mecca for Trump-era Republicanism.

But if Ron DeSantis wants to be president, he has to defeat Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and prominent Florida politicians aren’t so sure either of those things will ever happen.

Ron DeSantis’s bid to become to the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential candidate got off to a wretched start on Wednesday, when the Twitter Spaces event at which he made his announcement in the company of Elon Musk was hit by a series of technical glitches.

Discussing the “DeSaster” on her MSNBC show The ReidOut on Wednesday night, anchor Joy Reid joined in the mockery of the event and showed a clip of Mr DeSantis meeting supporters at a fundraising bash in Sioux Center, Iowa, last weekend in which he wipes his hand across his face before patting an elderly gentleman sitting nearby on the shoulder.

“Part of running for office is shaking hands,” the host commented. “Not only does this dude eat pudding with his hands, he literally wipes his nose and wiped snot on somebody’s shirt. We have of it.

The “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account released a stylised advertisement of over three minutes that was roundly mocked for heavily featuring Elon Musk, whose platform was used for the Republican’s long-awaited campaign announcement.

President Joe Biden poked fun at Ron DeSantis as the Florida governor’s 2024 campaign kickoff during a Twitter Spaces event with CEO Elon Musk was riddled with tech issues.

Ron DeSantis’s long-anticipated 2024 campaign bid for the White House on Twitter Spaces was marred by a host of glitches that gave his political rivals enough ammunition to mock the Florida governor.

Long silences and persistent echoes marred Mr DeSantis’s Wednesday announcement that he made on Twitter’s audio group-chat feature with billionaire Elon Musk who has long boasted about several overhauls to the social media platform to make it better than it was under previous leadership.

Vishwam Sankaran reports.