I'm glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this.
Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start.
This. Love him or hate him, it doesn't matter- surely everyone can now agree Musk's personal, totally idiosyncratic treatment of the platform has rendered it completely useless for anything beyond pure vanity.
A public-owned twitter-type platform is the answer, imho.
We have publicly funded tv and radio- I think they have done a great job for what they are- what kid hasn't been improved by exposure to Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street?- but we live online now. It's time for a publicly-owned messaging system, whether that be federated or otherwise.
Mister Rogers is dead. Sesame Street (CTW) is now a company that markets toys to kids, the same behavior that was alarming when the culprits were Transformers and G.I. Joe back in the 80s.
Today we also have a largely corporate-captured government. The trend is to privatize everything, allegedly because of "efficiency."
However rose-tinted your view of history is, this ain't then.
I don't think this could work. Private companies like Twitter can enforce limitations on content that the a government run platform couldn't enforce due to the first amendment.
His changes to the site were optimized for maximum praise for himself.
He destroyed the verification system that was intended to avoid public figures from being impersonated. Now it's simply people who have bad posts, now getting more attention to their bad posts.
Hateful individuals can now pay 8 dollars to prioritize their hateful posts under their targets' tweets.
Terrible, awful, spoiled little man.
My suggestion is to establish a tweeters anonymous?
We can? Functionally none of the controversial changes have been any inconvenience to me. It's been more of a self-fulfilling prophecy as far as I can tell: people declare each change to be the end of Twitter, and the resulting firestorm of tweets about Twitter's changes is actually what degrades the experience of using the product.
I haven't actually noticed much change there. Sure, people seem to be angry about all kinds of things, but that's the normal over on twitter. The core functionality of 'post tweet' and 'see tweets others have posted' seems unaffected for me and every user I follow.
I don't really see what everyone is angry about. "User XYZ did X controversial action and got banned for it" is of no interest to me, partly because I am not interested in User XYZ, and partly because the sorts of things I use twitter for don't revolve around seeing the spread of whatever the next activist thing is.
An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn't go out. Maybe that changes one day, maybe it doesn't. But that's the reality today.
Except that emergency broadcasts (at least where I live) interrupt all television signals, all radio stations, all cable TV channels, all cell phones (unless you've intentionally disabled them), and one place I lived they even appeared on satellite TV channels. They even go out on satellite radio in North America. Then, if things get really bad, klaxons blare.
Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense.
I think this could make sense since it's effectively an application/presentation layer abstraction, platform-agnostic, free to use, and with servers available for licence-fee-free on-prem hosting, e.g. by the governments trying to send these alerts out -- so govts could be responsible for uptime as well as how to present data to users.
Of course, this raises in my mind two issues:
- How can this clearly improve on the existing emergency alert systems? (I'm thinking better geographic granularity and rich media, but that might not be a strong argument)
- Would most people be ok with having this software on their phones? (This is coming from a place of having friends and relatives who still believe COVID exposure alerts were a government spying program of some kind)
This is also working on the assumption that the government is both technically competent and design-minded enough to both have high uptime and present data in a readable way, and I may very well be ignoring some downsides of using ActivityPub that I just don't know about.
Think of Mastodon what you want, but a government using an open standard for communication should be applauded.
In case of issue with one platform at least a place where to broadcast still exists and people can share it, create new copies, share on their own timelines, or other creative alternative ways to share the broadcast.
Unsurprisingly it's much worse than the website itself and not working well (look at the comments).
I think you have a point, but Twitter was very reliable until it was bought out, and served as a centralized notification channel where you could have all your sources, official and informal. I don't want to have to replace it by 6 different apps for weather alerts, drivebc alerts, wildfire alerts and so on; especially if they are worse than Twitter. I also prefer my government to spend money on the actual service (predicting weather, tracking and fighting fires, tracking traffic) than on duplicating the work of creating a delivery channel.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.bc.gov.Wild...
The push api is a thing now, and it can send notifications to clients even when the site is not open[1]. Imo they'd be better off bringing the mobile site back and wiring up a service worker and the push api. All open standards and nobody between them and you :)
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
Usual icing on cake: Experience worse or broken than longtime working and more accessible previous solution.
:(
You have to go where the people are. It's unlikely that anyone will remember to install the MyCity app or whatever, and then you're just sending your messages to /dev/null. You don't get an error when you send out the alert, but the same number of people receive it as the over-rate-limit Twitter account. 0.
I am surprised that the B.C. government can't just text message people based on location. Governments in the US definitely can. I recall some year in NYC where everyone got mandatory stream of consciousness "alerts" from the government. ("We're looking for some criminal in New Jersey! It's a dude guy!" OK, I'll get right on that? "We're expecting ONE INCH of snow. Everybody panic and don't even think about going outside!" OK I guess? We all that weak from climate change already?)
I also have to say I wouldn't object to just putting my email address on my tax return and getting a weekly newsletter from the city that way.
Same here in Poland. I frequently receive messages about extreme weather, counter terrorism exercises, the balloon thing recently.
There are a lot of people saying that in this thread, but I think "the people" have a responsibility here too, no?
Ukraine, for example, is not using Twitter for this - they use their own emergency app for events that include Russian air attacks, shellings, chemical and radiation hazards. You can't leave the lives of your citizens in the hands of a mercurial, over-medicated wildcard.
It's not that simple. Emergency communications need to go where the people are, full stop. So even if some government sets up its own Mastodon instance, it still needs to put most of its effort getting its messages out on proprietary infrastructure. The Mastodon instance didn't actually solve the problem.
My city 2 years ago sent an emergency alert text to everyone in the area that our water was tested as not safe to drink, and a link to their website for more info. The site was hosted on their server, in their server room in their main city hall. (Capital city, >250k residents). The web site was completely unaccessable for days.... Not even something like cloudflare, or any kind of CDN for caching..
even with the best intentions this is not going to reach everyone.
what if the app is not compatible with my phone?
what if i am travelling? should i download an app for every country i visit?
just give me a website address where i can subscribe to notifications. and offer different ways to access the notifications (including twitter and their own mastodon server, but also telegram channels and others (does whatsapp or signal have something like telegrams channels?))
It was called Twitter.
Federation should solve this.
>B.C. government refuses to spend $8 to keep their emergency services announcement host account active amid wildfire evacuation announcements.
>Twitter’s API service limits tweets for non-paying users to 1,500 a month — not enough for many emergency accounts. And while a small fee for the platform's 'Blue Check' service will increase that ceiling for individual users, the cost of an enterprise account has reportedly climbed into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Put it on a website that is available to all, and if someone wants to create a bot that posts it to private platforms that's a better way to solve the problem.
Something you won't find in the main article or the Reuters coverage.
In fact, searching news.google.com for "dutch government mastodon" doesn't turn up a single mainstream media outlet covering it save for this one Reuters article about Germany:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-twitter-suspens...
It's silly - and distracting - to blame these platforms for what is ultimately local, state, and federal governments shooting themselves in the foot and putting the people they take a oath to serve at risk.
My wife is in grad school and we're taking on loans, part of which involves FAFSA. I spent a mildly infuriating hour or two the other day trying to figure out our next steps, in large part because every single HTTP request to studentaid.gov was taking a minimum of 8 seconds. Meaning literal 2-minute page load times, which makes an already confusing situation about 10x more frustrating. And then when things did load, a significant portion of the time, there were significant bugs like important "notifications" appearing and disappearing, or not being clickable and just a "figure it out yourself" type deal.
The way the system works, getting multiple contractors, etc, which I've been a part of as a contractor before, is just destined for failure. Maybe it works for NASA rockets and defense equipment, historically, but the process fails us when it comes to building tech in a significant number of cases.
I'm not sure what the right answer is. Maybe just open source standards, software, and protocols. At least in those cases, you stand a chance of someone who knows what they're doing helping out when something goes wrong.
As a Canadian - our government makes uniquely shitty websites. We can't even successfully pay a private company to build tech for us - we end up with billion dollar abominations like the PRESTO card.
I don't know what the solution is - but if the government makes a emergency alert site, it will be awful and no one will use it.
Whoa, actually I just found they have an entire design system[1] to refer to for any official digital services. Cool!
[0] https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html
Of course the basis for comparison is the US.
If you can’t self-host, then it’s highly advisable to actually pay for a service you deem critical.
Let me introduce you to this little thing formerly called the EBS (Emergency Broadcast System)...
Perhaps that's different because the FCC regulates broadcast stations? Perhaps it's not.
Which will literally fall on deaf ears. Mastodon is the in vogue thing but we’ve done all this before with RSS feeds. The simple reality is that people didn’t use them.
The government are meeting people where they are rather than making people come to them. Which in situations like a wildfire is exactly what you should be doing.
Its lunatic to think about how much governments have relied on Facebook and twitter to give out information. Have a precense, sure, maybe even constantly post information in form of links to self served content. It just makes no sense to exclusively share information through Instagram or Facebook.
"DriveBC has a dedicated website, but many access its automated messages through its Twitter account, a platform accessed by more than a quarter of Canadians in 2023, according to the company’s advertising data."
The issue is no-one is going to know about that website whereas a tweet it likely to get retweeted by other residents.
That’s where people are.
The number of people hanging out on some government website is probably low.
The person tasked with warning is probably concerned with getting the word out to as many people as possible and less so how we would like things to be (not have to use twitter).
If this was only announced via some obscure website we would be wondering why they didn't just tweet it out / why the government would expect people to just find some random website and refresh it all day.
I mean take power outages. I have to figure out the website every time there's an outage then wait for them to actually update it, whereas Twitter already had pictures of the substation that was on fire.
Convincing people to return to websites for this kind of thing is boiling the ocean.
First, I don't think Twitter has the competence to do this - they're barely functional now. For instance, they threw away their infra for identity validation, so how will they figure out who needs access to the klaxon button?
Second, Twitter is shedding users like a husky in the desert. As someone above said, if nobody see it, who cares?
Third, there is already an emergency alert notification system for cell phones. Building another one just provides conflicting signals in an emergency.
Twitter is dude's blog now. Pretending it is good for anything other than servicing his ego will result in frustration and waste.
An RSS feed would suffice. Having essential information shared by means of open standards would prevent such standards from being replaced by proprietary bullshit, which would be common good.
To inform the general populace, you go where they are.
While I agree with the sentiment, if you're wanting to broadcast emergency information to as many people as possible, you have to go to where the people are.
First rule is you go where the people are
When a disaster is ongoing, radio is a much better medium than something like Twitter.
The sentiment, while understandable (and not entirely unfair), assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$. A Twitter account (well, before the Musk takeover anyway) offered:
a) The ability to disseminate information to essentially anyone with a mobile device and an internet connection. b) Low setup costs, maintenance overhead, and technical expertise needed.
As a taxpayer, I would like my government to be cost-effective in resource allocation - Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way to maintain a 1-->many communications infrastructure. That said, I fully agree that they should explore alternatives in light of Musk's antics.
It is important to also remember that government can be slow when it comes to embracing tech. ActivityPub is only 5 years old, and that's a short-time by govt standards, RSS is effectively (and quite sadly) dead for the everyday folk. This may or may not surprise the readership here, but Ontario's healthcare system still uses faxes to transmit patient records: https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate....
Sadly this will never be the case, but it should (and absolutely can) be.
I worked on a large government project, and learnt that what they generally do is outsource to the worst bidder. There's so much bureaucracy that accountability disappears. This means that as long as all the boxes (on all the millions of TPS reports) are ticked, company X gets the contract.
Bear in mind company X isn't the best, not even the cheapest (far from it), but they're the best at getting government contracts because they know how the game is played.
Now the government's overspent, under-delivered, and still nobody's accountable for the complete disaster of a project. I wish I could give you exact details on what I'm talking about.
An alternative is just hiring good engineers, but that would introduce accountability, and nobody in government wants that.
Cost-effective resource allocation is one part of government but if you think that’s all there is to risk management in the public sector you’ve been mainlining “govt as Corp” Thiel views and forgotten risk management overall, part of which is disaster recovery, failovers, high availability, no single points of failure, all of it. Using pre-Musk twitter had these same drawbacks too.
The moment a bunch of heads of state got account takeovered in 2019-ish should have been the wake-up call.
To your point about having gov. be cost-effective, i fully agree with you! While i happily (yes, happily!) pay my taxes when gov uses them to good use (because it helps everyone in the long-term even if they dont realize it), i dislike poor decision-making by govs when they waste my tax dollars. So, i think the issue is not so much that govs can not afford to make long-term proper decisions of choosing scalable, appropriate tech platforms...but rather, that many govs simply make poor choices, or don't know how to make a choice, and then rely on ther wrong people to help make bad choices.
As the point about faxes...the U.S. also relies on fax as the approved "private" communcation system within healthcare...Not because gov doesn't move fast enough nor because someone made a bad tech decisioin...but we use faxes in american healthcare because someone made a bad tech decision AND THEN proceeded to explicityl cement that decision into law!
Overall, i blame gov, but not too roughly...but i also blame our gov/political leaders for not thinking properly long-term, and often relying too much on private entities...entities who do not always have the same incentives alignbed with citizens. Ok, ok, i'm off my soap box now. Thanks for your patience! :-)
But direction to manage such services needs to come from the gov't and the public generally. And it's indicative of a loss of a public-sector / public-service ethic generally -- especially in North America -- that that never happens.
The worst problems as I have seen them it is when the government outsources these things, puts out RFPs and the lowest cost bidder, or best connected bidder, wins and produces garbage. I've been privy to that process (homeless shelter management system / case management system for the City of Toronto) and it was depressing as hell.
The EU and various European countries have already made moves into the fediverse. But this concept of offering services like this has seemingly become foreign in North America, where privatization and private public partnerships are the order of the day and people just assume that anything done by the public sector is going to be expensively run garbage.
Not saying that WordPress is the best solution, but I think over 45% of websites online use it, so toss a coin and it's probably a WordPress site. It should be very easy to find people who are familiar with it or can help work on it if that's ever needed.
A solution like that is small and simple enough for even a municipal government, but scalable enough that it could work for a national, or even international level organization too. I think something like this would be a prudent way to publish important information online.
But with absolutely no continuity or performance guarantees, and answering to absolutely nobody.
Twitter (pre or post Musk) and any social network are companies that do whatever the hell they want whenever they wants. They answer to nobody, and nobody should rely on them to do anything of importance. Sure you can share cat photos with your family, but don't do anything that actually matters.
Maybe the service is down for a day = tough.
Maybe they charge you to post on their service = nothing you can do.
Maybe they charge people to read posts on the service = nothing you can do.
Maybe they flip the whole script and delete everything and do something totally different = tough.
Government relying on such flaky mechanisms to disseminate critical information to citizens is the problem here.
quibble, but the Fediverse is 15 years old (https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/)
> “We've been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications,” said Reynolds. “But it really doesn't work once things change.”
I frequently drive a sometimes closed section of road with flashing “tune to AM 560 for road info” signs. It would be great if there were “follow DOT on [service]” options.
Twitter has just shown it's not reliable for one of its supposed core use cases. At least if you don't buy a twitter blue account? Passing the buck here is not right either.
HOWEVER - governments started posting information to twitter because that's where the eyeballs were. It's not really that different from sending out information via the big 3 tv networks - those are private companies as well, but it was the most effective way to get info to as many people as quickly as possible.
Imagine one of the big 3 tv broadcasters dropping the ball on dispersing wildfire information, they'd be abject with their apologies to the govt and the public.
I guess where this comparison falls apart is we never saw an egomaniacal shitlord buy a big 3 tv broadcaster and run it into the ground.
Doesn't the government have special powers there that give them rights for special types of message broadcasts? I don't know, but I always presumed they did (at least in the UK).
That wouldn't be a bad compromise here too. The big five should be treated the same way as TV channels (if my mentioned understanding is actually correct).
I don't think this is the sort of thing that needs legislative intervention, I think Twitter needs to get out of the way and let the govt communicate with its citizens when lives are at stake. Rate limiting their tweets during wildfire evacuations was a colossal fuck up. "Colossal fuck up" seems to be Twitter's current operating procedure, and will doom them as a platform.
A far-sighted Twitter owner would want as many government agencies and news alerts on the platform as possible. The cost giving them API access is dwarfed by the value of making Twitter the place for real-time information. That's the whole point of Twitter.
These agencies provide value to Twitter, not vice versa. Asking them to pay means you don't understand that.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...
From TFA. Seems like this is about the API?
The way things were done at Twitter really just suggests it wasn’t carefully thought through. The whole point of a business is to make win/win relationships with customers.
During some recent fires near me the official communication was confused and awful. One retired firefighter just decided to tweet status updates from listening to the operations radio and he became the most reliable source around.
At least the mobile phone alerts worked for evacuations.
In German: https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-ha...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743
https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-turn-off-amber-alert...
When I was in Texas I received the alert 3 or 4 times in a couple of days. The people I was visiting seemed to think that was typical.
It seemed to me that the alerts weren't very localized.
Law enforcement can't see everything, even if they have a "BOLO" (be on the lookout), but with millions of people on the roads, someone might spot the kidnapper's vehicle.) Issuing Amber Alerts sooner rather than later (or not at all) is optimal and the Amber Alert system in Texas has definitely resulted in some child rescues before those kids disappeared forever, especially if they have plate numbers or descriptions.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...
Either self-host your own solution, built on open source dependencies, or pay a company on a plan with an SLA that meets your needs.
In the Netherlands, you're _expected_ to have WhatsApp. So many places rely on it. There are even official WhatsApp neighbourhood-watch signs on streets. It's short sighted and frankly, stupid.
I draw the opposite conclusion here. I think governments should be using more platforms to blast their messages. Redundancy for mission critical messages is a good thing. They should be using both their own app / infra plus all other social medias that are available. Update your website, RSS feed, send whatsapp messages, send an instagram message, send a tweet, post to your facebook, etc. If someone doesn't want socials, there should be ways to opt-in to texts or phone calls. Ideally they can have one place to enter the message on their end, and a bunch of checkboxes to which socials / channels to post a message too. Behind the scenes it will apply appropriate transformations for specific platforms if necessary (turn words into an image for instagram, split posts if longer than the twitter limit, etc.).
I'd assume that gov't resources are limited. Especially during major emergencies, when little local municipal governments are usually the ones on the front lines during the most dangerous phases.
Maintaining "all of the above" social media accounts during emergencies does not sound compatible with that realty.
any government messaging plan that revolves around twitter was irresponsible. same with whatever other single social media platform you want to name.
> DriveBC has a dedicated website, but many access its automated messages through its Twitter account, a platform accessed by more than a quarter of Canadians in 2023, according to the company’s advertising data.
The API limit is crap yep. But there's also been a bunch of messing around with it lately that's broken things and sometimes it's working sometimes not etc.
Anyways, not supporting Twitter on this but posting manually still viable for updates I suppose.
With all the kvetching about insufficient regulation and social media being a public utility, you would think that one government somewhere would've built a public utility Twitter alternative for that purpose, right? But nobody has. A few days ago, I wrote in detail about this surprising dynamic: https://loeber.substack.com/p/10-why-is-there-no-government-...
There are companies that offer alert broadcasting services (e.g., [0]). Have any of them started to support ActivityPub? Could they make 1:m focused platforms that implement a subset of the standard really well? Do we need to define a subset of ActivityPub that increases efficiency for this kind of mass communication?
I have no answers, only questions
For once, no hardcoded tweet/toot limit. The only limitation would be the network - the ability for toots to leave the home instance as they're pushed to other instances.
Given the current size of mastodon.social (the largest Mastodon instance) and its ability to push toots out to other instances (including mine) despite the size of m.s, I don't think it would be an issue in the current circumstances.
If something less obtrusive is wanted, a simple push notification or webpage?
I think the best approach is to still use Twitter but also use all Social Media like Facebook (especially), Insta (hard to do for text) but you could link to their Website with the same posts/info.
In the end you have to try and inform the public where they are, just like would happen on TV or Radio in the past.
Maybe it is actually a space for Google/Apple/Microsoft/Linux as OS makers to provide some functionality to do this kind of broadcasting over the internet in addition to working with Telcos for SMS/mobile based alerting.
If these messages are all related to road conditions (Drive BC), would an interactive map, a search engine, a table, or integration with Google Maps not have made more sense here?
It's good that our governments are losing the ability to use this lazy, inefficient, terrible form of communication (thousands of short form messages on a private platform).
Every government agency using privately owned social media as an exclusive channel for communication was/is acting irresponsibly.
The problem is people have it in their head to use and rely on Twitter so the agencies are doing their best to get information out to as many people as possible
Now that Twitter has crippled this it’s likely time to just stop using it as no information there is better then out of date/missing critical information
How did we get to this point?
The real issue is not rapidly reacting to changes to the platform, such as immediately moving to a different platform, whatever it may be.
(Arguably something like this did kind of happen with the UK's rail system, with the end result that Railtrack (the private company which John Major had rather unwisely sold the network to and then failed to regulate properly) was effectively re-nationalised.)
Consider how quick, easy, obvious-sounding, low-skill, and low-budget it was for $Govt_Department to sign up for a Twitter account, and just start tweeting.
(Similar for Facebook, or whatever)
Compare that with the "better" alternatives using RSS or whatever. And recall how resistant government organizations are to accomplishing anything that requires "not our usual" skills, planning, approvals, funding, etc.
Solar activity can effect radios, storms can effect satellite feeds, and not taking into account policy changes can bump you into rate limits.
This was a failure of the social media team to calibrate during a feature change that came unexpectedly.
This could be a chance to use this bad press on Twitter to pressure then into exempting public good type accounts.
Twitter is a monopoly and should be treated as such. Same with Facebook, reddit, et al.
Sure there would be push back, but after making those companies public trusts with government regulatory oversight who cares anymore?
Oh, yeah, the tyrannical CEOs and boards of directors. They’ll care. But they’d also probably be facing indictments for undisclosed criminal activities, so…
I mean the BC government is hundreds of years old so they know all of this so it should be a pretty easy win for them. It isn't like this is a new thing.
There is just as good of a case to be made that the BC government was the "vendor" here, by indirectly delivering users to Twitter for decades, for free, by using the private platform for exclusive, official communications. Or that that was the "payment".
BC government would have agreed to TOS, like everyone else, which likely state Twitter can change service levels at an time.
The moment heads of state were ATO’d to shill crypto scams by a teenage in Florida iirc in 2019/20 should have been the final straw in relying on twitter for public interest.
Next, get PTAs and local govts off Facebook pages.
An expensive enterprise account is mentioned, but no linkage as to whether they would be forced to use it.
They don't control the man-child at the helm of Twitter. But they can definitely control their own servers. And I'm sure plenty would federate with their Masto instance, since it could easily be scoped to govt stuff.
Control your own servers, control your own data. Control your own destiny.
For example, there's a wordpress ActivityPub plugin that will interoperate with many existing sites on the Fediverse.
If every single event was a similar alert, there would be alert fatigue and it would reduce the efficacy of the alerts.
BC also annoyingly only has one level of alert so you can’t currently suggest multiple level handling. Most devices only handle two alert levels anyway.
There are also multiple levels of information. Many of the tweets posted aren’t things that need immediate action. It’s just a notice for people to be aware of.
And then that begs the question of why Twitter? Well because that’s what people are (or were before Musk) paying attention to. You post messages where the people are
Believe it or not there are loads of folks who think this is government overreach. But they are absolutely fine with corporations harvesting their every move.
This should be a big embarrassment for Twitter.
1. Does Twitter even know about this?
2. Did the transportation minister bring this to Twitter? I mean, if it's such a big deal, is it worth a ring, email, or DM?
3. Did Twitter refuse to uncap it?
I don't know if the reporting is sloppy, or if there is an agenda, or whatever, but there are acknowledgements by the government that they were lazily relying on Twitter without any kind of formal arrangement.
If I'm handling comms for the ministry, I would go to twitter with a public weal request that it designates critical information accounts with no practical rate limits and that are visible to all without sign-in. They have the capability. Someone needs to initiate it.
I don't think that every government ministry or important figure should be expected to have to proactively reach out to Twitter and make a "formal arrangement" to avoid being rate limited on one of the world's primary sources of real-time information. This is simply a bad standard to set. Nevermind that, the rate limits were implemented a week ago so calling it lazy to not have a "formal arrangement" in place in less than a week is silly, especially considering that Twitter support's response times right now are atrocious.
Twitter isn't obligated to provide services to the state, but maybe if there was a little diplomacy, there could be a reasonable arrangement. Twitter certainly does not have to crawl all accounts and determine which ones are emergency services.
I don't care one way or another. I'm highlighting the information gap and explaining what I think should be done.
But later down the article admits:
> Twitter has put new rules in place that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying
So if the B.C. government had bothered paying for the service rather than relying on a free account to disemminate mission critical info, there would have been no issue.
So this is really just yet another biased Twitter hit piece rather than actual journalism.
It's not a public service. It should never have been used that way. People need to stop posting twitter feeds as generally accessible things, and treat Twitter like a private site that it is.
Anyways, thank you Musk for teaching the public that they were using it wrong. Now they can demand their governments actually create proper services for the public instead of relying on his stuff.
Now if kids schools etc could stop using Facebook groups too? Wouldn't that be nice?
This has been a huge problem with Twitter, noted by many in the emergency communications sector going back at least 2 years or longer.
They probably don't know that anything else is possible.
They probably responded... with a poop emoji.
