Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma
A heavily publicized Twitter conversation between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Monday night began with an immediate bed-shitting technical crash. When things finally kicked off 42 minutes later with a much smaller audience, Musk blamed a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which did not appear to be true, as the rest of his site continued to function as normal. In the time the platform struggled to serve video of the event, however, a deepfake on YouTube purporting to show a livestream of a gray-looking Musk addressing a factory audience attracted 200,000 viewers to a channel running a crypto scam.
Trump was slurring his words and seemingly lisping.
Trump and Musk’s conversation on Spaces, X’s live broadcast service, had been promoted for weeks, both by the two men themselves and by secondary characters looking to glom onto the massive audience it promised to attract. As the stream froze and repeatedly crashed, some of those characters expressed profound disappointment.
“Not available?????” tweeted conservative personality Glenn Beck. “I planned my whole day around this. I don’t want to miss a word.” (Meanwhile, the leftist Twitch celebrity Hasan Piker, who........