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Comment by SargeDebian | Hacker News Reader

Some relevant context: the Netherlands recently had a severe storm, for which the government sent out a Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB), which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't signed in, which highlighted the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out.

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I remember saying to friends "isn't it a bit of a liability how Twitter is becoming the 'official' outlet for so many organisations, including the government?" back in like 2011 or whenever it was breaking into the mainstream. At the time there hadn't been any major controversies that I recall, so it looked like I was tilting at windmills a bit. It is nice to finally feel like I'm not the crazy person now, after a decade. Though it was quite disillusioning to see how many people wildly swung their view on whether it was a good idea to have one company controlling so much of society's discourse, based entirely on whether they agreed with the company's current leadership's politics, not on principle

> ...the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players...

This is such a big problem where entities - and not only governments, but also other corporaate entities, and private citizens - rely far too much on the for-profit tech platforms.

> which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't signed in, which highlighted the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out.

The government doesn't have a website where it can host a page and create a link? That's just lazy.

Of course they do. But people are not trained to bookmark a slew of government pages and then figure out the right one to go to in various situations. They are, however, trained to go to Twitter and see urgent alerts collated neatly in one place.

The government sent out a message with an embedded link to Twitter. It sounds to me like the government can choose whatever link it likes and that in this case they unaccountably chose twitter.

I doubt the assertion that even a simple majority of people are "trained to go to Twitter" for urgent alerts, or that even if true, this would justify the government using them as the default platform to link to in their own government created alert messages.

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