And now imagine a citizen wants to quickly check news/updates/whatever from a government agency or a city council which doesn't have a fediverse account
At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?
Also: https://xkcd.com/743/
Exactly this. It's fine if they use twitter to syndicate news that is also announced on official government systems, but not as a primary and certainly not as a solitary distribution method.
> Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?
That would be hilarious and maybe it would result in some people learning that twitter is in fact a private corporation that can do whatever it wants, but i doubt it - similar incidents proved that large swathes of users believe twitter is or should be treated as public infrastructure rather than prompting significant moves to user controlled platforms
Any talk about privacy awareness is invalidated when public sector entities endorse these platforms and encourage citizens to participate.
Any talk about the public sector not picking winners is a joke when they explicitly advertise and provide links on their websites to particular platforms.
We have normalized alot of abnormal stuff in the past decade...
Google results that require a login to view are cancerous
It's the responsibility of the government to make information available where the citizens are. As the citizens moved from radio and TV to social media, the government followed.
Of course, running a website, which allows those quick edits requires with dealing with secure infrastructure, maybe apps dir field agents to write something etc. which they could all outsource to Twitter (and vendors of tools built around Twitter API for scheduled tweets etc.)
Its somewhat similar with public broadcasters (BBC, German ARD etc ) putting their content on YouTube (where consumers are) vs their sites (where they control it, including privacy concerns)
Reach.
IDK if anyone is using it as the sole method of communication.
But Twitter in practice has a much higher reach than every other method.
Stuff like "public transit line 17 out of service" being announced only on Twitter is completely par for the course.
REACH
It’s a business. Free speech is the brand.
Not only, but also.
Does the Chinese government run an account? Have American politicians been as upset about this as they seem to have been about TikTok? I'd check the former, but, well, the subject under discussion.
Simple, if you are not there you do not exist. Go and check how many of your contacts follow the oficial accounts of your local government.
Also, the common layman isn't anyone that suddenly gets the urge to check your official webpage, if you are lucky you are in their social media results.