This account can no longer post all Tsunami Warnings, Advisories, Watches
twitter.com
twitter.com
Apparently they have an RSS feed, though for some reason they don't advertise that in an HTML <link rel="alternate"> element. https://tsunami.gov/events/xml/PAAQAtom.xml
The role of these announcements is to warn people about a possible life threatening tsunami - they should be using any and as many platforms as possible to get the information out - private, public, open and closed.
Mastadon retains a lot of this, but honestly, the lack of search and lack of algorithmic time lines both make it vastly less usable & less enjoyable as a product.
It is a crime that a generation of users believes that this is what online discussion looks like.
I disagree mainly because I don't think the government can be considered to have done this job sharing information by posting it on a signup required, private platform, regardless of convenience. For the majority of the population who don't use or monitor Twitter, forcing governments to find alternatives is an improvement.
100% agree, if that were the case. Except it isn't. NWS provides numerous different mechanisms by which you can get alerts.
The issue is here is a medium that many people do use, and use fairly consistently, so the government rightly said: oh, we should provide that information through this medium as well as (not instead of) the other mechanisms, thus maximizing the ability for people to access this information.
Most people don't have rss readers, and those that do clearly don't check as frequently as twitter or other social media.
Most people don't have shortwave receivers.
Most people don't use mastodon.
Many (most?) people aren't listening to the radio during the day.
> forcing governments to find alternatives is an improvement.
The government provides numerous other channels. This isn't a matter of the government finding alternatives. The goal of these alerts is to be accessible to as many people as possible. That means if there is a significant audience of any given communication channel, there is an immediate benefit to expanding publication to those channels.
You're acting like the NWS using twitter is restricting access to the information, when the purpose of using twitter is to further expand functionally useful access to it. Saying "don't provide this information on closed/account driven services" just because they're "closed" is counter to the goal of these alerts, which is to inform as many people as possible.
It's hard to appreciate how much worse Twitter has gotten, and how much sense it made to be there when it was such a vibrant open platform.
I also think another commenter is spot on, that this is/was one of the best most effective ways to get information out fast. If one of your friends notices the alert they'll probably message you even if they're in some other area to let you know. The ability of any random thing to quickly get visible & boosted is unparalleled, especially for a general purpose communication network.
Cynicism is fine but it has to be willing to meet with truth to & this all used to make so so much sense, was so good. And again as another great commenter said, there were & ought to be many different ways this stuff was sent out; it's never just been Twitter.
I hope some day we can subvert them & make it happen & get on with life.
The USA Should adopt a similar law for certain communication platforms that force them to provide public announcements of general interest. Kind of like the amber alerts in cell phones.
You mean, like the Emergency Alert System, the latest in a series of such requirements in the U.S. that have existed since 1951?
And, being blunt, effectively 0% of the global population uses RSS for news. Especially time sensitive news.
It was incredibly easy to share & relay things quickly.
Nothing else in my view comes close. Twitter had won Metcalfe's Law.
Metcalfe's law states that the value or impact of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.
There's places like Facebook where there's lots of users but most only connect to people they know. Blogs and email can connect people who don't K ow each other, but they have to go make the connection. Twitter has an open culture, where people reshare things, or people converse in threads, & we see those cool things & follow those other people. Twitter was the only successful self growing system on the planet.
Now the connections are all being severed & the network is dying. Such a fucking sad shame pity. This is a burning of the Library of Alexandria of our age. Also no one can afford to look into the archive anymore either so truly some dark Dark Ages shit. Absolutely tragic & monstrous, just vile villianshit.
Why would they _not_ publish alerts on a communication channel that millions of people demonstrably check frequently?
This is a genuine question: do you get this information from their VHF band reporting? or check their website regularly? or their RSS feeds? moreover even if you do, do you think those are likely to more frequently used/checked (or even available) by people than twitter, Facebook, etc?
These social media companies aren't Public services, nor have they been deemed critical enough to be required to provide the same facilities as traditionally regulated communication channels.
And before you say the US Government lies all the time, this is the National Weather Service, not the CIA. They’re about the as non-partisan and trusted as you can get. They don’t run psyops programs, they provide massive piles of free and valuable scientific data to the public every day. They devise sophisticated weather models and run supercomputers. I think they probably know how to use an API.
This is a pretty common pattern. Daryl Herzmann's iembot accounts are in a similar situation, I think.
guess tsunami alerts on the platform just weren't worth that much to him
So it's not a totally crazy question to ask if a government agency should have to pay a fee to use a private service like Twitter.
Presumably the government agency would have to do a cost/benefit analysis on running their own service versus paying to outsource it.
It seems neither do they.
Make your own platform if you want to distribute information. Don't expect to be able to exploit others for free forever.
They made use of a functionality that was willingly made available for free. That changed, so they are stopping to use it.
They made no financial profit, but offered a public service of great utility, for a marginal cost to Twitter that is practically zero. In return, it made Twitter's platform more useful. Everyone benefits. It baffles me to see this called "exploitation".
The new cash-desperate Twitter instead wanted to squeeze a few bucks from them, and lost a high profile user and became less useful to remaining Twitter customers.
Why is this the hill you want to die on? Tsunami warnings are unequivocally a public good.
They were additionally doing Twitter, not exclusively.
All you need for a twitter feed to be valuable is some number of people who use twitter, but don't listen to the radio, don't regularly check the NWS rss feed, don't have hardware to receive the wireless alert system signals, etc. If there is such a group of twitter users then there's a group of people who can now receive alerts that would not otherwise be available.
It seems to be that's what they've done. So I'm not sure what your problem is? Why should the government be paying twitter to provide a service to twitter?