A New York Times article that was released this week described how former President Trump defeated Governor Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) presidential campaign in an online battle, which has contributed to a decline in DeSantis’s popularity among voters.

The New York Times first revealed this week that DeSantis’s camp tried to set up an online network of well-known conservative influencers to spearhead the fight against well-known pro-Trump influencers as well as the 45th president’s campaign across social media in May during a covert meeting at a pollster’s house.

As campaign writer Nicholas Nehamas and politics reporter Ken Bensinger reported, three attendees of the meeting informed the Times that the event backfired and “had an opposite effect” on some of the twelve or more important influencers present who respected DeSantis.

“Some people who were at the meeting, which had not been reported before, didn’t think the DeSantis camp realized what they were getting into,” they wrote.

A few weeks following the meeting, DeSantis and his team decided to officially start his campaign by means of a Twitter Space alongside Elon Musk, the company’s owner, as well as David Sacks, an entrepreneur. However, Breitbart News claimed that the Space was plagued by technical issues:

“The Twitter Spaces call was supposed to start at 6 p.m. Eastern Time, but it started a few minutes late as an unknown person said it was ‘quiet.’ The event’s presenter businessman David Sacks, started to welcome Elon Musk and said that this was ‘historic’ before the sound cut out. After that, the sound kept cutting in and out multiple times, with echoes and voices that didn’t sound like the governor’s, whose voice the discussion was about.”

“Both Democrats and Republicans quickly made fun of DeSantis after the space had to be taken down because of technical issues that required the three men to start a new space on the app,” as Breitbart News reported.

According to This week’s article, the DeSantis campaign claimed in a post that night that it had “broken the internet,” and three individuals at a meeting the next day claimed that then-campaign manager Generra Peck pressed the scope of the story, leaving them bewildered as they saw it as terrible.

The Times reported that the DeSantis campaign continued to push forward with the help of the DeSantis War Room X account, Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s Rapid Response Director, and a few influencers who joined the DeSantis Army, despite what appeared to be futile attempts to win over some of the top right-wing influencers.

But the war on social media hasn’t worked very well. This week, the Times said that the campaign had “a reputation as being thin-skinned as well as mean-spirited.”