B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations | Hacker News Reader

B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations

vancouverisawesome.com

346 pointsnosecreek385 comments

> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency.

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.

Why do they need social networks for that? Just set up an oldschool website and post stuff there.

Define social network. I agree, and would personally consider public websites, old and new school, to be social networks.

Yeah, not me. That's a website. It's a pretty distinct technological entity, that has nothing to do with "social" networking which has been defined during the past 20 years as a single website with "social" sharing capabilities.

Ideally a government-run emergency broadcast website would have literally 0 social features.

https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-01082

> Notify NYC messages are available through many formats, including email, text messages, telephone, a mobile application, the Notify NYC website, RSS, Twitter, and American Sign Language videos.

Social can certainly be part of the mix. But its still silly to make it an exclusive channel.

Not trying to be a pedant, but the WWW is a network, and being public implies a social use of the entity. I guess I am curious how exactly you would differentiate the two? Does it need a like and subscribe button? Public discourse?

Yeah I don’t label something as “social” just because it’s “public”.

I guess I’m saying we don’t need to like and comment on emergency updates. You can already share by an innovative technology called “URLs” ;)

Who's going to think of going to a website when under stress when they already have channels they go to and expect to be populated?

Convincing people to return to websites for this kind of thing is boiling the ocean.

Correct. But I think an app on iOS and Android could certainly do it.

So we should exclude Blackberry users?

Like, tongue in cheek, but until the mad weirdo took over, Twitter was no less effective and open-access readable than an app, while requiring zero engineering effort from organizations that don't have engineering capability.

What's wrong with a website? If something massive is happening, do you open twitter to look at selfbrags, burger pics, etc., or do you open your local/national newssite (cnn.com, fox.com whatever) to see what happened?

Want to see the weather? Will you open a weather site or wait for someone to put the report on twitter? Think you felt an earthquake... twitter? Or national eaqrthquake monitoring site? See a bunch of firefighters... twitter or emergency site?

"What's wrong with a website" is that it is not part of a relevance-curated, pushed feed that people are already using.

If you look at pre-idiot-king Twitter, when there's an earthquake it fills up with comments about it, and very rapidly. Geological advisories get retweeted, again very rapidly. It turns out that yeah, this kinda actually works!

I am not, I stress, saying that I like that this is the reality of things, but it speaks for itself.

> Why do they need social networks for that?

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.

You're quite right, most people don't camp out on the DriveBC map or events pages. They do however park themselves on the webcam pages (which update as frequently as every two minutes). The webcam component of DriveBC is 10:1 in the request stats. The majority of bandwidth is consumed on the webcam pages. Have a look around, try out Replay-the-Day.

They did. From the article:

"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.

A lot of people will go to Twitter (et al) first, because it's easier to find things happening in your region than figuring out which website has information on it.

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.

And then what, have everyone sit there all day and hit "refresh"?

That's where the people are. A message can get spread much wider, and quicker due to retweets/re-shares.

> What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols.

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.

An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn't go out.

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.

> Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense.

The comment you are responding to is not doing that.

The point was that there is little value is using a niche social media platform for emergency broadcasts because so few people use it.

Sure, once you have the bigger platforms covered, there's no harm in adding smaller ones, but people calling to ditch twitter and use mastodon or some other service are being silly.

Why ditch one? Just post to both.

Exactly.

You should publish to multiple platforms if the message is deemed important. Nothing wrong with duplicating messages across private and public infrastructure websites.

Where do the klaxons blare from? And who decides to blare the klaxons?

I’ve never lived in a tornado area, but my understanding is they do have these as a tornado warning device in those areas.

Here in tornado country we have sirens that are used to warn of tornados. They're controlled by the county. They test them every Wednesday afternoon. You're supposed to tune in to news to find out what's going on. They're just an alert to tell you something (usually a tornado) is going on. They also were to be used in case of atomic attack.

If you hear the siren you're supposed to seek shelter and then tune in to find out what's going on. This is an effective way for dealing with any emergency, even outside of tornados.

In the Netherlands, emergency sirens are tested at Noon on the first monday of every month for 1 minute. If you hear a siren at any other time, it's serious and you seek out more information from sources relevant to your area.

> Where do the klaxons blare from?

Everywhere in a city, and more scattered the farther you go out.

If you ever lived in the Midwest, it's the same things that do the monthly-or-whatever tornado alert tests (and real tornado alerts).

> And who decides to blare the klaxons?

Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever

> Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever

It's definitely city-level, in at least some places. I know because I was visiting a friend and heard the sirens go off. I assumed it was a tornado warning (i.e. actually serious), but it turns out that city (and only that city in the area) is dumb and blare the sirens for severe thunderstorm warnings, basically crying wolf every time.

It might just be a liability issue... basically, by warning people to stay inside during a declared natural weather crisis, they won't have to pay when people ignoring that go outside and get injured by a falling tree or whatever.

> It might just be a liability issue... basically, by warning people to stay inside during a declared natural weather crisis, they won't have to pay when people ignoring that go outside and get injured by a falling tree or whatever.

Even in America, I can't imagine someone suing the city because they got injured during a storm, let alone winning their case and making the city pay.

The real story was someone got killed by lighting, and the city decided to "do something" so that never happened again. However, IMHO, they're going to shoot themselves in the foot because their citizens are going to be less prepared for a tornado, which could kill many more people.

> Even in America, I can't imagine someone suing the city because they got injured during a storm, let alone winning their case and making the city pay.

In Germany, you absolutely can. It's called "Verkehrssicherungspflicht". Given how Americans can get sued by a random child wandering onto their property and injuring themselves on a trampoline or a swimming pool, even if the area is fenced off, I assumed that liability for natural disasters would be just as insane.

I suspect this depends on the country.

Here it's mostly fire departments and town halls that have the sirens, and they are controlled by the town hall, département (one level above) and the interior ministry, so each of these level can decide to blare the sirens it is responsible for.

It basically never happens except in real bad circumstances.

Actually I said "here" but I don't live in France most of the time, and here in Belgium it's only based on the phone network now, no sirens anymore.

Interrupting all signals that are in use by commercial companies, is still ultimately relying on commercial infrastructure, though?

Yes, signal usage is a bit easier to jump on top of as the government regulates those uses of signals. There really isn't a way to do that on the internet. Best they can have is to regulate that Twitter has to give them unlimited limits in emergency cases. Which, yes, they should do.

This will annoy a ton of "free market" folks, as it will almost certainly make it harder to enter the market as a competitor. Will look a lot like regulatory capture, all told.

> Interrupting all signals that are in use by commercial companies, is still ultimately relying on commercial infrastructure, though?

No, government owned cell towers, military owned cell towers, etc., also send out the signal, so even if every commercially owned cell tower suddenly vanished most cities will still be covered by enough signal strength for a few hundred bytes of text.

Emergency broadcast isn’t quite the word. Canada also has a similar emergency broadcast mechanism.

This is more like updates on an ongoing situation. Social media is a reasonable way to deliver that.

Well that actually brings us to an interesting point, most platforms have fought with tooth and nails to retain carrier like status to avoid liability issues related to copyright infringement,etc but if they do that they should also be liable in all relevant jurisdictions to provide emergency alert services,etc.

Speaking as someone whose experience with the fediverse has been thus far pretty underwhelming: this could actually be a great use case for activitypub if phone OSes can implement first-class support.

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.

Phones already have emergency broadcast support. I really only ever see it go off for amber alerts. May be specifically for that, at the moment? Not sure.

I think Trump's tenure saw use of presidential alert use ( flag on your android you can't turn off .. easily ).

In Ontario Canada (maybe the same in other provinces), every Amber alert goes out at the highest level - Presidential/Nuclear. There was also no geo-fencing initially (perhaps there is now), but as horrible as a child abduction is - notifying people at 3am who are more than 8-hrs driving distance away is... not useful.

Have also seen extreme weather alerts, and one nuclear warning.

Even if the tweet goes out, you might not see it because you hit your daily limit of tweets.

Think of Mastodon what you want, but a government using an open standard for communication should be applauded.

You could have a system that broadcast on multiple platforms at once. They could for example have a kind of lightweight append only list of broadcast (let’s say something based on ATProto) on their own infra, and insertions are replicated to Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, whatever.

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.

This is wishful thinking, though. The people that governments want to reach are not on Mastodon. Moreover, they're not going to be for a lot of good reasons.

To inform the general populace, you go where they are.

So TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook?

Unfortunately: yeah, probably.

Or just dedicated apps. I have two different apps for warnings issued by German authorities. I can select regions that I want to be informed about and I'll get notifications on my phone for a few things. For example if there's a fire and they advise to keep windows closed, extreme weather warnings, and they also used to send out updates about changes to covid related restrictions.

But then there are multiple apps. What if we put those apps into one, using the web to make it broadly accessible and searchable.

It was called Twitter.

Federation should solve this.

Then we're conflating low valur alerts with high value ones and the value of the signal is lost.

Until twitter makes an actual emergency alert system, Twitter is not better than a dedicated alert app.

In some bubbles yes. During the aussie bushfire I checked the government app, and using Twitter didn’t cross my mind. If anything Reddit has been much better for local information, but usually for the Monday quarterback stuff rather than timely info.

If people have and use Twitter. I never have, so I would never receive the messages.

Twitter isn’t used by that many people in the US. 2022 numbers seem to show >20% of the country population is active on the platform. Even LinkedIn(!) broadcast would reach more people.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/05/10-facts-...

I'm in Germany and I don't know anybody who uses such apps. I wonder what their reach is.

You don’t have the NINA app? You have broadcast relatively often (multiple time a year) due to fires, active shooting, flood risk, etc. At least in Hamburg. It’s pretty useful.

https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/wa...

It also displays by default in usable English on an iPhone when the phone's interface language is set to US English (haven't tested UK English).

I use KATWARN because the local refinary, usually downwind of where I live, is required to announce if there is an incident (within 48 hours, probably).

please don't force me to install an app in order to receive important notifications.

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?))

Emergency alerts are the sort of thing that you don't want to be opt-in, simply because most people aren't proactive. It's not great for grandma to drown because she didn't know she had to subscribe to tsunami warnings on a specific website. Apps are also not ideal if you have to opt in and download them.

Traditional emergency alerts would take over all live media in the area, ie interrupt TV and radio broadcasts. In high risk towns like in tornado country they have literal klaxons that blare the warning to anyone within earshot.

As much flak as it got, the UK emergency alert system is a pretty good solution - collaborate with cell networks and the developers of the major phone OS's to push a notification to anyone in the at-risk area. It'll never truly be universal, but 80% of phones were capable of receiving the last test, and of those 7% didn't receive it. Honestly that's a much better reach that we ever would have had with radio and TV alerts.

well, yes of course, but if it is not opt-in then apps are out of the question anyways, because you can't have apps preinstalled on every phone. that just won't work.

there are different levels of alerts. obviously the really serious ones should be pushed as you say, but lesser ones, or serious ones but for people who are not in the region should be opt-in. there is no need for me to get tornado warnings from the area where my grandma lives, but i may want to subscribe anyways because i want to see her safe and maybe i am planning to visit. so it does make sense to publish alerts on channels that anyone can follow as they need.

That's the nice thing about NINA in Germany - I can pick very specific geographic areas to get alerts for, like the town I live in, the city I work in, the rural area my in-laws live in. If you're willing to spend a few minutes, you can adjust what level of warnings you care to receive, and how they behave.

>Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality.

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.

I publicly owned twitter platform is complicated and presents a lot of problems. I think the federated model has a lot of appeal here, as it allows governments to broadcast alerts out without requiring them to take on a large platform (and moderation responsibilities, which are really complicated for a government).

What problems do you see with a publicly owned twitter variant?

In an international world, which govt should operate it becomes a complicated matter.

Each government should own one. It doesn't have to be federated to be useful.

A large social platform simply cannot survive without constant moderation that goes beyond strict application of the law. You need some form of community standards in place.

A government agency governing what is acceptable speech is a bad idea.

Sounds like it would work in pretty much every country except America.

Ah yes, the world, long known for its lockstep dance of harmony.

Why would such a twitter variant need moderation? We're talking about a government notification system. Only people posting would be government officials.

A pure one-way notification system is not a "twitter variant", but a completely different beast altogether.

The draw of the twitter-like approach is that the government messages are a portion of an existing stream of communication that people are already using/consuming.

The article is about governments using twitter to send notifications. Lots - perhaps most - use twitter exclusively this way.

If you're saying Twitter variant, that implies a social network using text+image communication. If you want a notification system instead, there are much better and usable ways to implement that. See https://www.emergency.vic.gov.au/respond/ for example.

> We're talking about a government notification system.

This exists, and is called Wireless Emergency Alerts. Every phone sold in the U.S. today supports this out of the box.

Wireless Emergency Alerts are for emergencies. If you look at any government's twitter feed, the posts are either very much not emergencies, or in this post's context, too specific and numerous to use the system with. The government needs something besides a passive website and a highly active emergency alert system.

So use the alerts to instruct users to view a website or similar platform where more detail can be posted? Unless it really is an emergency, why's there a need to push so many messages to a social media feed anyway? What are they mostly about and who reads them? During Covid there was certainly at least something interesting to post fairly regularly, though nothing that wasn't already plastered all over newspaper headlines or regular TV/radio news bulletins. Even then I can't say I ever felt an additional platform was needed, and that really was an exceptional period in history.

Is NPR subject to these restrictions in the US?

Since when is NPR a government-controlled platform?

It's not, though it does get partial funding from the US government. I've been for a few weeks now to try and unpack the ramifications of public funded social media.

Blog post here: https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

The most common refrain that I get whenever this topic comes up is "First Amendment" - meaning that public funded social media should not be in the business of moderation; though I often wonder how come NPR, PBS, BBC and so on don't run their own social media websites (based on your deciding flavor of ActivityPub instances.)

I believe the German and Dutch governments run their own Mastodon instances, I don't understand at the moment why other governments don't follow this path.

It is.

You work for who pays you.

Right. NPR works for the public.

The problem where a platform that is truly bound by the first amendment would lose in the marketplace, because most people don’t want to be on a platform where Nazis can post as much as they want.

Platforms that censor are going to win in the marketplace, because that’s what most people want in a discussion platform.

I don't see any social network as a good answer in the context of this story. What's needed is robust public alert & notification infrastructure.

Yeah, I think federated is the right answer. You don't need to run a public platform, but you can run the infrastructure for government staff and announcements while still reaching the broader network.

Once a week my phone buzzes with some sort of child-alert, abduction and/or storm warnings. How is what's needed in this case any different?

Those are very annoying and usually useless, so many people turn them off (everyone I know does). And if you miss one for any of the many reasons that could occur in an emergency, I wouldn't know where to go to seek out those alerts.

So for that we blame...Twitter?

Where in my comment did I mention twitter, or imply anything about it? I was just saying that the automated phone alerts aren't a great fit for something like wildfire evacuation instructions. At the very least they shouldn't be the only avenue for that information.

Twitter was fantastic for that kind of thing though.

You didn't. But the topic is public notifications and Twitter. You seemed to imply the alternative to Twitter isn't effective, within a thread that starts with Twitter isn't effective.

People die or get injured in my region annually during flash floods, snow storms, etc., so most people don't turn off these alerts. The ones who get hurt are the unlucky or disadvantaged or people who ignore the alerts.

Child alert systems find about 50 or 60 kids a year (US). Turning them off is a pretty shit move for the ~dozen per year that come through.

> if you miss one for any of the many reasons that could occur in an emergency(

"It's not perfect so why bother?" Is an odd attitude. Per the above, I keep on emergency weather alerts even though I might miss some.

>I wouldn't know where to go to seek out those alerts.*

You can fix that. I know where to go for such things during adverse weather events, and when an AMBER alert has been issue for a kid I'm often curious enough to see if it's been called off a few hours later.

> Child alert systems find about 50 or 60 kids a year (US). Turning them off is a pretty shit move for the ~dozen per year that come through.

As far as I know, the only options on my phone for these alerts are "deafeningly loud alarm" and "entirely disabled." After my phone woke me up at 3 AM for some kid being abducted in some other town, it's now off permanently. I did the same for weather alerts after it destroyed my ears to tell me about some flash flooding alert on some street across town that I will never use.

There is literally no situation in which my phone making a deafeningly loud alarm is acceptable, so I turn all those alerts off to make sure it doesn't happen again. If the implementation were better, I might leave them on. But it isn't, so I don't.

No situation at all? What if you were on that street?

Then it should vibrate like any other notification. There is no situation I can think of that is improved by someone at city hall having the ability to make every phone in the area scream at full volume, versus just behaving like a normal notification.

>There is no situation I can think of

The horizons of your thinking appear to be truncated to somewhere within a few dozen yards and ~10 minutes of your current time & location. Can you think of no incident where there was an otherwise avoidable death or injury that could have been prevented with a timely alert?

Not one that couldn't have been equally well handled by a normal notification, no.

I'm not quite clear on this-- are you maintaining that stance only with respect to yourself, or for all people across society in all situations?

For me, it is unacceptable for my phone to ever make a noise that I did not ask it to make. I can't think of any situation in which this is not true. A normal notification will get my attention just fine. If I have to choose between deafening noise and no notification, I will choose no notification every time.

I think there should be a third option, which is to treat them like normal notifications. This is so obvious to me that I'm utterly baffled that it isn't an option. We probably wouldn't even be having this discussion if the option existed. But it doesn't, so here we are.

I would even OK with deafening noise being the default. I would argue that it shouldn't be the default, as I think the false-alarm problem is a serious one that will cause people to just turn it off. But I understand the other side of the argument.

My opinion is anything that causes a bunch of deafening noise from every phone in the vicinity should be treated with the same level of gravity as turning on the tornado siren. We don't turn on the tornado siren for every kid who gets lost or every flooded road. We shouldn't be blowing up every phone for those events, either. Tornado coming to town? Ok, blow up the phones. Missile coming down from the sky? Ok, blow up the phones. City-destroying wildfire coming in? Ok, blow up the phones. Kid got in the wrong car? Berry St is flooded? Sorry, those doesn't qualify for the tornado alarm, so they don't qualify for blowing up phones either.

Okay, then it's just a matter of you & I drawing the line in different places, and maybe yours is further out due to less likelihood of dangerous weather conditions, or the thrill of potentially having an unscheduled white-water rafting experience through the town, or personal preference. I can see your point about the defaults. Cheers!

So you've determined that you are a exception in so far as never being in any potential danger from something covered in the contents of a emergency alert.

This does not counter argument that the GGP comment is incorrect in labelling these systems "mostly useless"

I interpreted their comment as saying the specific alerts that user receives are useless to them. I definitely agree with that. If enough people feel as we do and turn the alerts off, then yes, I think the system itself does become useless. I don't know how many people turn them off.

This could be avoided by making the implementation less terrible. I don't know how we arrived at the current situation where they're either deafening, or entirely off. It seems really stupid to me that those are the only options. I would prefer to receive them, but it's not worth waking me up at 3 AM for a flooded road 20 miles away.

>If enough people feel as we do and turn the alerts off, then yes, I think the system itself does become useless. I don't know how many people turn them off.

That's like saying x = x. Of course if people don't use the system, the system isn't being useful. Contrary to that hypothetical, I am making the observation that people do use the system and often find it useful.

Sure, that's a fair take. My comment was more responding to your comment saying that turning off alerts is a "shit move," by explaining why many of us choose to turn them off.

One challenge with AMBER alerts is that they don't provide enough information for the receiver to determine if the alert reflects a credible danger to a child, or if it's a nuisance alert where the system is being abused during a custody battle. Further, the very nature of a highly disruptive, high volume alert like this is to encourage the public to take extreme action -- e.g. following a vehicle -- that increases danger for both the involved child and everyone else in the area. While there are attempts to fix this very broken system (e.g. [1]), for now I very much consider the cure to be potentially worse than the disease.

[1] https://kutv.com/news/local/law-introduced-for-new-criteria-...

>e.g. following a vehicle... the cure to be potentially worse than the disease

I'm not aware of citizen vehicle chases being a systemic problem. What other offsetting problems exist that negate the benefits of the system? I don't consider annoyance/disturbance to be sufficient to say it's worse than the disease (which implies it should be stopped, pending overhaul) especially considering the ability to turn the alerts off.

It's not possible to turn off alerts of the highest authority, "Presidential alerts", without turning off the phone. All basemodem and smartphone manufacturers selling in North America hardcode this into the black box part of the firmware. (Which is part of the approval process and why you'll never be able to buy a 'fully unlocked' phone.)

For example in Ontario, every alert is sent out at this authority.

There are lots of things the government needs to disseminate that are important, but don't need to be push notifications for everyone.

Most governments already have that... it's called a website.

Turns out they used twitter because that's where the users were.

Pretty much. So you use a website and for people who don't use it that's their problem. My town also (used to have?) has an automatic phone system but I don't really pick up random calls and don't have a landline now so that's useless.

>for people who don't use it that's their problem

You're evacuating, driving along a highway, and during the course of your trip the available evacuation routes change. A website is useless here.

The context of the conversation is emergency situations, that has to be taken into account when thinking about the required public notification infrastructure.

But what is reliably useful at that point? Radio maybe? I'm not sure how Twitter or a Twitter clone is any more useful than a website. Phone alerts are probably the best choice at that point assuming you don't have them turned off.

Twitter can’t be better than a website because Twitter IS a website!

What Twitter was is better than Facebook, the main other governmental alert platform.

How is it useless? You're in traffic, you check Twitter on your phone, you change your plans. I can't subscribe to an RSS feed on a phone by default

If you get a chance. You're not necessarily going to be in traffic so slow that you can safely do that. Maybe you will, maybe not. Getting an alert means you don't have to guess & keep checking. If there's an additional alert you get it and only then have figure out how to safely check it.

> You're in traffic, you check Twitter on your phone

That is illegal in B.C.

An elected official will not be satisfied with the “that’s your problem” response, because they fear those people will vote them out of office.

Websites don't really work that well for push-based information, nor do they provide the automatic amplification offered by social media.

Can I assume that you mean static websites, because there is nothing special about social media; Twitter is quite literally just another website.

> Twitter is quite literally just another website

Well, apart from the app

It is true that on the phone the way the information is presented is through an app ( and we can argue whether it is just a more restricted browser ), but definition of a website is:

related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server

If that is the case, app is just a bastardized website.

Twitter is not just a website, it is also a platform that facilitates push notifications so that people can receive information in near real time, passively, no need to visit a website. So neither Twitter or a website alone is the answer.

But that is not entirely accurate. The website/app instance is running on the phone/device/whatever. It is not passive. The user opened it ( or opted to keep it open in background ).

In other words, 'website' is visited. Information is accessed and sent back to the requester.

> The website/app instance is running on the phone/device/whatever. It is not passive. The user opened it ( or opted to keep it open in background ).

That's not how it works. Unless it's the foreground application, the application is not running; it's not kept open in the background. Instead, what happens is that the application registers with a push notification system when the user first opens it and logs in. When the user should be notified, the website sends a message to the push notification system's central servers, which notifies the phone (the push notification system does stay open in the background, but it's shared by all applications in the phone), which then starts the application on the phone to show the notification.

Thank you for this. It always helps to understand something better.

That said, does it change twitter's status as a website that just happens to have functionality X ( push notifications )?

Can WebNotify (or whatever) work? That thing that some sites nag me with could have a purpose? Does it work on mobile?

A user gets notifications without having to look at their phone. That seems passive? Sure, prior installation & configuration of the app days/months/years beforehand was an active step but once you give it permission to send you notifications all of those notifications are received without user intervention required.

Stop being facetious. Twitter is way more complicated to build than a static website, and even if you did you wouldn't reach the same amount of users.

A website is not the same as having robust infrastructure for public notifications. And to be clear-- neither is twitter, but a website you have to visit isn't as convenient or useful in an emergency where you want people to receive an alert without going to a website.

So, the requirements are more than a website, but also not a private 3rd party platform w/o service guarantees, and preferably something that doesn't have municipality, department or agency rolling their own solutions, duplicating effort, etc.

In the US the traditional systems are Emergency Alert & WEA but those don't encompass all the public awareness & notification needs that drive organizations to use something like Twitter. I'm not sure if the right answer is to expand those or creating something similar for scenarios currently outside their scope, but we could do worse than starting the conversation with that question.

Computers lack a protocol that drowns out anything and freezes your computer for broadcast alerts.

The online strategy so far, has to be where the people are, so most governments have multiple social media accounts, like Facebook and Twitter, and also websites and RSS. I’ve also seen, depending on the government, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, etc.

And, if I may, I think the point is that is all well and good, but for reliability's sake, a publicly, not privately, controlled alternative to any of the above (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, etc.) should be carefully considered. Mastodon is perfectly set up to be a valuable ADDITIONAL option for local governments using Twitter -- that doesn't mean "stop posting to Twitter," it means "also post to Mastodon" and be certain that, whatever shortcomings that may have, it's not entirely susceptible to the whims of a billionaire. Similarly, are Facebook posts by local government failing to reach users because of some change Zuck made to The Algorithm? Maybe we need to start looking into effective alternatives. If not, then we don't.

Those self-owned things, the website and RSS, already exist; all governments I’ve interacted with have one, and the subject of the article is no exception: https://news.gov.bc.ca/connect

The reality is that when it comes to spreading info to citizens you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

Netherland has something like that too. We had a big storm recently. Got three alerts on my phone. It works very well. Certainly better than Twitter.

Surely SMS is more than sufficient as an emergency broadcast system. Which is one reason the increasing number of SMS spam/phishing messages is more than just a nuisance, it's seriously eroding trust in the system. I know people now that basically assume every SMS not from a known contact is spam. Governments should have a vested interest in actually doing something concrete to tackle it, I'm not even sure why it's so hard to solve.

We already have an emergency messaging system called Amber Alert. Just generalize that infrastructure a bit and you're halfway there.

I really hope they don't do this. I already turned off those alerts because there are too many of them.

Why are so many children being abducted where you live?

Do you know of a better source for adrenochrome?

In some places the system is overused and alerts get issued in custody disputes, claims of abuse, etc. It doesn't always mean abducted by a predator or stranger and that's part of the problem.

> It doesn't always mean abducted by a predator or stranger

The overwhelming majority -- over 90% -- of children being abducted are taken by family[0], usually as a part of a custody dispute.

[0]: https://safeatlast.co/blog/child-abduction-statistics/

Yup. And I wish they'd make it clear. Not that I think people should be allowed to take the law into their own hands, but as courts are imperfect, I get why a good and loving parent might do this. There's a world of difference in how I would respond if I saw a concerned parent with their child illegally than how I would respond if I knew I was seeing an actual child predator.

Near a half dozen extremely impovershed reservations..

AMBER ALERT: Bike lane closure on State Street due to construction, use West Street for detour.

Yeah screw that haha, I'll take the Twitter clone for anything short of actual emergency.

Maybe, but it would need to be treated as a separate system. I turned Amber Alerts off after being blasted awake at 2am over a missing child five hours away from me. The chances of me ever being able to help in a missing persons case is already incredibly slim. It would be impossible at 2am unless the kidnapper hides under my bed.

The current system is used in a suboptimal way, at least by authorities in my state.

Yeah I have Amber alerts turned off. I guess other alerts are still on on my iPhone which is probably as close to a government alerting system as you're going to get.

+1, this system should be improved with a topic based subscription so individuals can opt-in/out of lower level alerts, but keep the ability for local governments to blast everyone in an area for emergencies

That's already the case.

> A public-owned twitter-type platform is the answer, imho.

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.

Can't speak for GP, but when I read that, I imagined a platform exclusively for official communications from government and municipal officials. The .gov / .gov.xx version of Twitter, if you will.

If it federated with Mastadon (or was a Mastadon instance) then others could seamlessly pull those official comms into their feed without having to ever navigate to the platform. Or, for those of us that don't care to have a centralized feed, we could just go to the instance directly for government comms. No more of this "get nagged by twitter ads while I try to read updates from my local government".

And I wouldn't bother to have such a site active on my laptop or phone any more than I would a website absent some emergency--in which case the website works as well as anything. And the government has no reliable way to push info out to me nor do I want it to have same--though maybe that's a US thing.

Well for now I don't bother having Twitter open on my laptop just in case my government would want to tell me something, so I don't see how this would be much different.

The main difference I see though is that since Mastodon provides RSS feeds, I could at least follow the feed of my country's emergency services without needing a specialised app.

RSS feeds are definitely an alternative but now you've covered ~1% (if that) of the population. I used to be an avid RSS consumer and even I don't really use it much any longer.

Apparently Twitter is used by 11% of the population here in Belgium, so that's certainly better but... how many of those follow accounts of the government? I suspect it's very low and most people probably don't even know all the levels that might potentially emit emergency warnings. I know I don't.

Given the general trust in American corporations, it's not absurd to think some of the 89% of the population that doesn't use Twitter would be more willing to install an application to follow official communication on Mastodon than to use Twitter.

Anyway warnings are just broadcast on the mobile network here, which works fine.

Yeah. Mobile phone alerts are probably about the best you can do these days beyond going house to house (and even then). You're never going to get to 100%. But, as you suggest, Twitter isn't even a particularly good channel. I use Twitter and I have no idea what my local government channels are, if any.

Even if you don't use it, you can check it during an emergency. Even if you don't check it, someone else else was checking it and relaying that information to you. You used to be able to search an account on an app you already have, and get the latest information. Now governments have to manage their own instances, you have to search their website, find the url, subscribe to it or download a custom app, and then you can finally see what used to be a search away from you.

That can only be described as a loss.

I can't get used to either Twitter or the fediverse, but they don't work differently on the discoverabilty aspect.

One would likely just subscribe to your city's hashtag for large cities or to your town hall's account for small ones, and that's all. The rest works like Twitter (except there is less risk of important posts getting invisibilised by the feed algorithm).

In my fediverse test, I just subscribed to #Antwerpen (as well as #Antwerp and #Anvers but that's a whole other problem...) and I did get relevant and interesting posts. In their small town my parents are subscribed to the town hall's Facebook account (the only reason they signed up to Facebook) and it would work the same on any other app, except it likely would spy on them a bit less. Mastodon's Android app is not a "more custom" app than Twitter or Facebook's apps are, on the contrary I would argue.

I just can't get used to checking this thing more than once every few days and like Twitter it just doesn't work if you're not constantly reading your feed, because then you're missing most posts.

At least there would be a central location. You would always know you could go there to learn more about government affairs. There should also be nothing preventing someone from mirroring GovTwitter to Twitter/Threads/Mastadon where the people are.

>At least there would be a central location

It's called a website.

Whose website? Does my local city have one? Do they have the IT resources to ensure it is hosted? Do they know how to get a .gov domain? What about state news? Lot of friction and multiple potential locations vs a Federally run resource.

Yes, all of this stuff had normalized processes before Twitter emerged from SXSW.

> Does my local city have one?

It's hard to answer this question without knowing your local city. My town of < 5000 people has the appropriate .gov site set up and maintained; it's one of the responsibilities of the local government. I'd imagine that any local government structure large enough to have evacuation plans in place is also large enough to have a website to communicate those plans on...

I live in about a 7,000 person town and they have a website as, I assume, most if not all of the towns in the state do. I don't know how good they are with emergency notifications on the site but then we don't have a lot of emergencies requiring notification.

Twitter is reliably real time. Yes, governments push information out in other ways, but it's unclear how real time it is. If you see a government account tweeting about a current event, you used to be able to assume that that was the latest information available.

This was especially useful for things like transit, or emergency situations. If there was a snowstorm, I would check the BC transit Twitter account. When there was an active shooter at my university, I checked the Ottawa RCMP Twitter account.

And I relayed that information to others, including people like you, making sure that even if you don't have Twitter you had the latest information. Now, Twitter can't be relied on for the latest information anymore. Government websites are not real time. There were millions of people using Twitter for this, and now they're no longer going to use the platform. This is absolutely a loss for the platform, no two ways about it.

I did not think this is what they meant from the comment, but I did immediately think it would be useful (and get around any 1st Amendment concerns) as you've suggested here: a platform exclusively for official communications from gov't at various levels / localities.

Everbridge is used by lots of governmental offices for this purpose.

Is PBS under first amendment obligations?

PBS isn't government owned or operated, I think it just receives some government funding?

Plus I don't see where members of the public can post content on PBS for the first amendment to even come into the picture. If an employee posts something objectionable, they can be fired regardless of the first amendment, just like any government employee.

It's a public service. We don't need the twitter equivalent to be 100% government owned and operated, do we? Seems like this would be an excellent equivalent.

That depends on the structure.

There are no 1st Amendment issues with Amber Alerts or weather alerts pushed to my phone, for example. But if CNN or Fox News are allowed to post to this proposed service, now we've got a different animal.

> 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.

Some content about manitoba seems like a small price to pay for accurate wildfile info.

The Canadian government is not held to that standard :P

I'd like to point something out here - In this case it's the provincial BC government, not Federal Canadian.

That said they just outsourced that shit to a chain of large corporations, all who have lost their contracts for doing really dumb and bad stuff, and they've definitely dropped the ball really hard on emergency warning alert systems working properly before. People could have died in their sleep. [1][2]

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-cha...

[2] https://www.vicnews.com/news/new-national-emergency-alert-sy...

Which public though? Twitter may be a private company, but it has an international presence. A publicly-owned system would have to be owned by the public of a particular country or state, leading to problems with differences between who pays and who benefits.

Funny I thought twitter was just an exhibitionism platform from the first day.

My suggestion is to establish a tweeters anonymous?

> surely everyone can now agree Musk's [...] treatment of the platform has rendered it completely useless [...].

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.

Did you even bother to read the article? The one which describes exactly what the problem is?

Just because you haven’t hit the limit does not mean the limit does not exist nor that it’s harming the platform.

I kinda like there being a limit. I don't follow a user to be able to spam me with a million tweets.

If you have more than ~10 things to say in a day, then sign up for another account and put links - ie. "CaliGov: wildfires around San Francisco. For more info follow @CaliWildfires2023".

Obviously there should be some UI to show you when you're getting near the limit, but I expect thats coming.

> I don't follow a user to be able to spam me with a million tweets.

Sure, but this is not your run-of-the-mill user. This is essentially an emergency broadcast service. Most people would follow the account with the desire to see "a million tweets" if those are relevant to the thing they are broadcasting. In fact, the absence of such tweets due to a limit is probably more harmful than the number of tweets that did go out.

> If you have more than ~10 things to say in a day, then sign up for another account and put links - ie. "CaliGov: wildfires around San Francisco. For more info follow @CaliWildfires2023".

That's absurd and spammy for no reason other than to get around a restriction that shouldn't exist for these accounts. And would hit the exact same limits. It's not like they used up their tweets spamming about irrelevant details.

> Obviously there should be some UI to show you when you're getting near the limit, but I expect thats coming.

That's putting a lot of hope into promises that haven't even been made.

He changed political teams. That turned many here against him. It also turned 98% of media against him, which has managed to drive a bunch of narratives.

If you didn't swallow media narratives wholesale and were just using Twitter you'd have noticed very little.

you haven't noticed the effect of any dullard getting signal boosted by simply paying $8 an hour? that's a massive change to content proliferation.

Musk essentially got upset that everyone on twitter didn't love him, so he bought the toy and broke it so others couldn't play with it.

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.

I think everyone is looking forward to Mark absolutely pulverizing him. Even friends I talk to who don't even care about or are involved in tech want to see this happen.

Weird thing to challenge a guy who's been training way hard for a few years now to an actual fight.

> Weird thing to challenge a guy who's been training way hard for a few years now to an actual fight.

Musk has a substantial physical advantage over Zuckerberg that training can't overcome. If they were professional fighters they wouldn't even be in the same class.

Yes, if they were both professionals, but they aren’t, so training can absolutely overcome the differences between them. Or do you really think no one has ever beaten a less skilled fighter who weighed 35 pounds more?

> that training can't overcome.

This can't be a serious claim.

Only so much a physical size can do when you basically sit around all day retweeting memes.

I've seen enough street fight videos to know a small guy with training can easily take down a big guy with hubris.

And enough time to get some training in although cardio is slow to develop

What advantage? Do you mean fat?

Once a fight goes to the ground, as it often does in MMA, it's much more technical in nature and someone who has put in a few years of effort into grappling techniques can trounce larger opponents by doing things that they simply aren't prepared to understand. The muscle memory and observation to understand what the situation is and how to move through it takes persistence over time to develop.

So my guess for this matchup is strongly weighted towards a more prepared Zuck being patient, finding openings for a takedown and then winning by submission. That said, it isn't a jiujitsu match, and there won't be gis, which shifts around the techniques available. Elon has a chance if his claim of having studied some martial arts as a teen is true, but he is also a big liar and equally likely to cancel at the last minute.

I thought the fight has already been called off by Musk's mom. Is it still on?

Personally I don't see what chance Musk has. He looks terribly out of shape, Zuck is younger and much fitter. And apparently he's actively training, rather than possibly decades ago.

> I thought the fight has already been called off by Musk's mom.

This never happened. His parents objected to the fight taking place, but the plans haven't changed any. They've booked the venue and everything.

You’ve obviously never been a competitive fighter. You can overcome large weight gaps against someone completely untrained, quite easily. I’m not saying Zuck can, but someone who’s talented and been training 5-10 years in BJJ, kick-boxing, MMA, etc can wreck people much bigger than them.

Doesn’t age work against Musk pretty substantially?

Not age, but his physical condition sure does. He's not exactly in good shape.

Really? I don’t know much about fighting, but my impression was that being 52 is a big handicap when competing athletically against a 39 year old in general. Is this not accurate? Curious!

I don't know about fighting in particular[1], but in sports, there is a detrimental effect related to age. But it's relatively slight and can be overcome through training.

Generally, older people are more likely to be out of shape because they're more likely to be sedentary. And, of course, if they had a lifetime of bad habits like smoking or drinking, the cumulative effects can be significant.

There's another age-related sports thing -- people who are in professional sports tend to beat up their bodies quite a bit. They age out of their sport, not really directly because of the passing of time as much as because eventually the cumulative damage catches up to them.

[1] That said, I know a couple of people in their mid-60s who could kick the crap out of the majority of 20somethings.

This whole fight thing is childish and ridiculous, and makes both of them look bad.

That's why I'm enjoying the whole idea.

IMHO, doing anything other than not giving a shit is just giving them undue attention and further canonizing these billionaires.

That's an excellent point, and big picture, I don't actually care. But the siren call of schadenfreude is hard to resist sometimes.

I spiritually agree with you. At the same time, it is amusing and reassuring to see just how dumb these fools truly are, so blatantly on public display.

Others will of course see a blueprint.

Really? Even if everyone is just secretly wishing one of them gets hit in the head hard enough that they become the next Howard Hughes?

BBC said it:

> "Mr Musk has a history of making statements that are not serious or which fail to happen."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65981876

> what kid hasn't been improved by exposure to Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street?

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.

> Mister Rogers is dead.

I think that's a matter of perpsective, considering that Mr. Rogers was a faithful Presbyterian minister.

Mr. Rogers was like the father I didn't have, and he changed me profoundly in my childhood by his direct and candid engagement with the camera, as if I really was a special person that he deeply cared about (and it was true.)

Mr. Rogers left a legacy that continues to change me and other people, especially those of us who grew up under his wing. There are lovely films made, and some of my favorite YouTubers love to sing his songs. I miss him, and he's still very much alive in our hearts, and in the miracle of television recordings.

https://youtu.be/YIV9E2bUS5M

Reliable and fast push notifications from trusted accounts are the critical piece of infrastructure that needs a public option. Something less than the existing emergency alert systems that allows for individuals to subscribe to and is easier for local governments to onboard to.

> surely everyone can now agree Musk's personal, totally idiosyncratic treatment of the platform has rendered it completely useless for anything beyond pure vanity

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.

This article is literally about a government agency that couldn't communicate emergency fire evacuation because they were rate limited, due to the idiotic changes made by musk.

That can only mean Twitter can't be relied on for anything other than vanity.

Maybe extend the Emergency Alert System law to Twitter. Anyone in the zone with the Twitter app installed gets that screeching alert tone followed by the color bars in the app and then the message. I'm only half joking.

For the half that's not, No.

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.

> how will they figure out who needs access to the klaxon button?

Exclusive for Twitter Blue++ subscribers, only $189/month

Not just protocols, but networks too; for emergencies there's still reserved FM / AM radio frequencies and the like, but in case of war or calamity, the first utility to go (and it's not classified as a utility yet!) will be the internet. No internet, no Mastodon or Twitter or anything anyway. And it'll be the last to be restored in terms of priority, after water, electricity and gas.

Can't they just send emergency text messages? Good ol' SMS. They should be able to use phone infrastructure for emergency notifications.

What if the phone infrastructure goes down for any reason? Having the data backup is smart because many of these folks have satellite internet even when their phones don't work.

When the Dutch government is going to take the problems with the C2000 system seriously remains to be seen though.. :)

Totally agree. While it was nice to piggyback on a private company app for a while, the concept has been proven. Mission-critical messages require mission-critical infrastructure.

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.

They use Telegram - highly popular in Ukraine, Russia for messaging as well as news consumption.

Or everyone can just wait until these temporary limits are removed or have consumer pressure them to do it faster.

I'm sure the fires will wait.

There's more than one way to publish information in the meantime (see: their own websites, Facebook, instagram, etc, working with the media).

How did they do it before Twitter?

I highly doubt these caps will be around for long to the point we have to re-think social media and pretend Mastodon will ever be a thing.

>Oh my goodness the people are dependant on this essential service to find out information about some ongoing wildfires and it isn't working!! Is there anything we could do?

>Well you could pay you $8 hosting bill?

>Anything, anything at all we could do?

>Pay the hosting bill. It's $8

>My god man, why is Elon Musk doing this to us?!? Is there any way to get this to stop?

>Well we could pay the bill, which is $8.

>We are completely helpless in this situation. Let's complain about it on twitter!

$8 for individuals. The BC Government is not an individual.

I’m sure snarkily repeating the same thing will change that fact, though, so keep it up!

@DriveBC is already a verified government account, what are you talking about $8 for?

Also, the “temporary” tweet limits are supposedly an anti-scraping, not anti-people-not-paying-for-Blue, measure.

There are two reasons here why "just pay the shakedown" isn't a compelling argument.

The first one is obvious. Why should public institutions (or anybody) preferentially line Musk's pockets, especially when every other social media site is free?

The second is more subtle. The goal of this type of social media outreach by government is to make sure the messaging reaches as many people as possible. But Twitter, by instituting these restrictions, also limits the amount of people who can read these essential messages. So even if the government pays, its tweets reach fewer people than before. And thereby the government indirectly discriminates against people too poor to pay the fee.

Because nobody uses those other social media sites.

Why should our governments line the pockets of verizon, cogent, L3, AT&T, when they could just broadcast the messages on a hacked together lorawan chat handheld that my friends and I use to talk to each other at burning man?

> Because nobody uses those other social media sites.

You realize Twitter isn't even in the top 10 social media platforms worldwide. Facebook has almost 6x as many users.

I think this is their facebook account. It's login-gated: https://www.facebook.com/TranBC/

It is insane to me that people will go to these lengths to avoid spending $8.

>B.C. government refuses to spend $8 to keep their emergency services announcement host account active amid wildfire evacuation announcements.

On principle I don't think they should. Twitter intentionally degraded an existing service. I don't think they should even spend a single dollar as they have proven themselves unreliable with changing things on a whim. It's not really about the money. It's about having control over the system that is used for critical services.

What if they didn't pay their hosting bill?

The article discusses that this is actually in the tens of thousands of dollars:

>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.

As a BC resident: I am totally fine with that. Twitter never should have become the government announcement site it did. I don't want critical announcements to be made through a private foreign company with extreme political leanings and financial ties to the Saudi government that requires an account to view. And I certainly don't want my tax money being spent in that way. I shouldn't have to have a twitter account, or interact with any site with "terms and conditions" in order to view critical safety information.

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.

> The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start.

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...

When was the start of twitter or social media as a reliable medium during an emergency. Radio/TV/News media/Phone calls I thought would be best.

> their own social media servers

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.

Experts? Where were these so called expects X months ago preaching that these for-profit platforms are not public utilities. Just because they're ubiquitous doesn't mean anything more than everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. Don't confuse convenience with dependability and proper infrastructure.

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.

> 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.

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.

Why not create a government "adwords" style JS include (open sourced) that is required for sites over a certain number of users, but optional for smaller sites. A banner that can display government warnings or messages in an emergency. It could even use basic geolocation to only display to relevant users.

> Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality.

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.

Don’t rely on the free tier, at least.

If you can’t self-host, then it’s highly advisable to actually pay for a service you deem critical.

> Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality.

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.

> I am surprised that the B.C. government can't just text message people based on location. Governments in the US definitely can.

Same here in Poland. I frequently receive messages about extreme weather, counter terrorism exercises, the balloon thing recently.

Yes, you have to go where the people are but also remember that the audience is capable of using multiple channels and the audience has made shifts to novel media many times before (printed news > radio > broadcast television > cable > internet, et cetera)

> You have to go where the people are.

There are a lot of people saying that in this thread, but I think "the people" have a responsibility here too, no?

Honestly I'm torn here. Twitter is a good example for your specific scenario here, but the US government, at least, is absolutely not trustworthy for building and running infrastructure.

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.

So they will hire a team of government employees to set up a mastadon server over the course of a year, then add some staff to maintain it and some more for public outreach to make everyone aware this is their new channel, at what cost? Versus paying a nominal fee for Twitter? Nice idea to have "public infrastructure" but does it make sense in this case?

This can also be a disaster, as most municipalities don't have the infrastructure and redunancies to handle the huge spikes in traffic that emegencies can require.

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..

how about this - one of the most deadly fires in California history was the one that destroyed the poetically-named town of Paradise. There is basically one road out of a small town surrounded by rugged hills. There have been fires there before. SO the County Sheriff teamed up with a private company to REQUIRE payment from evey citizen for an early warning system. That early warning system DID NOT WORK on the day of the deadly fire! It is well-documented.

This! A BBC mastodon instance would be a great way to go (for the UK)

Since we're talking about BC, they released their wildfire app[1] a few years ago and made it so you can't use the website from mobile anymore. The rationale being that this app can notify you of evacuations in progress

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...

I simply hate this world with everyone wanting to shove an app to your smartphone (which you maybe don't even have, what about those people?).. sigh.

Usual icing on cake: Experience worse or broken than longtime working and more accessible previous solution.

Even with the app, you're still relying on APNS and GCM for push notifications, so it's not really getting "proprietary infrastructure you have no control over" out of the critical path. Granted, Apple and Google push services rarely go down, but it's still funneling public safety alerts through a non-government entity, and last I checked (years and years ago) there were no metrics or insights into deliverability, retries, opens/clicks/views, etc, plus those services do have rate limits too.

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

>I'm glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this.

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.

> What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols

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.

They should be doing both. I should not have to sign away my rights (EULA) to access public services.

They are. All the information is available on the web site.

> What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols

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.

Mayyybe.. "Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada" (formerly Industry Canada) has a pretty decent website[0]. Their information architecture (site structure) isn't so great IMO, but the actual functionality is quite solid. Interestingly it appears to be using Drupal. I wonder if it was put together by a government web dev team or an outside contractor?

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

As an American that moved to Canada, I actually like the government websites up here. I can generally find the information/services I need.

Of course the basis for comparison is the US.

>Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality.

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.

I work in disaster management.

First rule is you go where the people are

Perhaps it would make sense to have your official website as the main source of truth, and broadcast that fact to other platforms. "News update: [short recap], full details on gov.io/situation"

But most people are not on Twitter.

When a disaster is ongoing, radio is a much better medium than something like Twitter.

Both is better still

In Germany, we have this nice NINA app, which updates live warnings from city(as well as several cities for huge disasters) from fire, smoke, heavy storms, bad weather, WW2 bombs blocking & evacuation etc. This is really effective compared to Twitter/FB whatever that some of us don’t like to use. When I visit some other place for vacation, I really appreciate this approach.

I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how its the government's fault for relying on a private service for public communications.

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....

It is the gov's fault for relying on a service...that lacked a formal legal agreement that favors the gov, and even better that favors the citizens who pay taxes to said gov. But, i am not going to fault the gov folks too much, because hey they're human, and also because i'm pretty sure that the gov's intent (in deciding to use mechanisms like twitter) were not evil, quite the contrary no doubt. I fault such governments not because they're thinking evil, but rather poor decision-making. Also, you make a valid point that gov entities often lack enough tech personnel...However, i feel gov entities should at least have some small numbers of tech personnel who - not only install hardware, software - but advise governments on what technologies could fit the very specific needs of the citizens. Corporations for years/decades have technology advisors on staff; basically IT/tech/digital folks who don't go anywhere near software/hardware, and instead advise corporate entities on leveraging the most appropriate tech solutions for whatever scenarios come up for said corpporations. What any gov should always ask themselves in cases of deciding for platforms for emergency use: what mechanisms do we need in place that will scale to provide the service (emergency comms and/or broadcast) that our citizens need, etc..

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! :-)

The goal of govt here is to reach the breadth of it's audience. To that end: it takes some really unproven assumptions to assert that they coulda done better than publishing where people already are. A "scalable appropriate tech platform" is nice but the point here is that there's a significant number of people who will use the funny bird app but not whatever other channels you establish, no matter how wonderful they are.

Ok, if there's the need for government to be present where people already are, then - much like the U.S. emergency broadcast system - there would need to be an accommodation that allows government to "interrupt this message"... without hitting against an API limit, etc. I honestly don't know if regulations govern that on tv airwaves but I imagine so..in which case for profit social platforms need similar regulations.

> ActivityPub is only 5 years old

quibble, but the Fediverse is 15 years old (https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/)

The provincial and federal gov'ts all sorts of online services fairly effectively. e.g. CRA's isn't awful, even if rudimentary -- it beats what I hear the IRS offers to Americans. They have hosted services all over the place and infrastructure to host. And there are, surprisingly, actually reasonably talented people inside the public sector that could run a Mastodon instance and publicize it.

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.

You’ve got to wonder how governments executed emergency communications from, say, 1800 until 2006-ish. The secret is they did, and there’s ways to do it still.

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.

They have public TV and radio. those were not easy tech when it started. It's just a matter of will (and a consequence of geriatric leadership everywhere)

> assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$.

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.

> Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way

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.

Just as an example of how simple it could be - a WordPress install would get them an easy way to manage content on a website with different users and publishing permissions (so it can integrate into their human organization in a useful way) and should work not only to display information on the website, but to provide a search on that site, and you get things like RSS feeds for free. Hosting WordPress isn't free, but it is relatively straightforward and affordable.

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.

TranBC is a wordpress site. DriveBC is four bare metal hosts that have a baseline nic load of around 1 Mbyte continuous. On 'snow days' it goes up two orders of magnitude - yes, close to saturating single gb nics on each host. We followed a mantra of "publish to static; static is king".

WordPress can emit statically-hostable websites, though you may lose that site-searching functionality. It would be possible for those who work on the site to log into a running WordPress install, to write and manage their content in the dashboard, but for that to inform and redeploy a static site. It's not a requirement that the place where the Wordpress-powered site is hosted to also be running PHP and the WordPress app on that server.

People will blame Twitter, but imho, a public agency should not rely solely on scale provided to it by a single private platform. It looks like they recognize it too:

> “We've been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications,” said Reynolds. “But it really doesn't work once things change.”

Were they exclusively using Twitter, or offering it as one of many channels so people could choose how to receive info? The former is a terrible idea, the latter is great (until 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.

Doubtful. Canada has emergency alert systems in place over AM and FM radio, over Broadcast TV, and over SMS/cellphone. Those are the systems I'm aware of, but there may be more.

In bc there is drivebc which is the source of truth for road conditions (with webcams)

There are also status pages for bcferries translink and wildfires

Wildfires has a webpage https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map

An app, and a map https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee...

It looks like they had a website too, but most people went to twitter for updates

Agreed, this was already a frustration of mine. There’s been a scroll limit on Twitter from forever ago, and the most frustration I’ve experienced with social media is realizing I had to sign up for twitter if I wanted to look at the public communications going back a few hours by my local police department (at the time there was a manhunt in my neighborhood and we were being advised to stay indoors. I was spooked.)

I have no recollection if Twitter has ever claimed this is its purpose, but for all intents and purposes that was the supposed value add of Twitter wasn't it? Public figures / organizations can use our platform to communicate with the entire world near instantaneously?

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.

I felt like I never "got" twitter and never became a heavy user, so I've been feeling pretty smug about its downfall.

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.

> It's not really that different from sending out information via the big 3 tv networks

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).

Funny you mentioned the UK - I'm in Canada and our BBC and CBC channels have an even larger responsibility to inform the public than the American big three, but they receive govt funding.

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.

Yet another example of how these new Twitter API limits are self-defeating and poorly considered.

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.

This isn't about the API.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...

> Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, however, Twitter has put new rules in place that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying. The move was carried out partly as a response to rising concerns artificial intelligence platforms would use the historical archives of social media platforms to train their large language models.

From TFA. Seems like this is about the API?

I think the author is conflating, the API limits are not temporary, but the new tweet limit imposed by the app are, and DriveBC specifically said "have exceeded the temporarily imposed post rate limit" - I emailed the author for clarification, but I'm fairly sure he's conflating.

EDIT: I emailed the author and he said it's a mistake - he's updating the article.

Very cool! :)

This could even be an upsell opportunity by twitter, offer a new “super verified” tier where an account bypasses all rate limits for readers (as well as the writer). This allows a public agency to distribute real time info to the masses for free and Twitter doesn’t take a loss on it.

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.

Any rate limit scheme should be deployed first in a soft or "warning but disabled" mode. That way you can run it for a while and monitor via logs/metrics what happens. Of course not suitable for impatient people..

Twitter is terrible ... except it is still the best real-time broadcast tool available to governments and those without IT staff and budgets. Most local groups around me just stopped trying, or reverted to Facebook. They used it because it was free and easy -- the idea they could build their own alternative and get people to follow it is just impossible for them.

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.

Loads of people commenting under their tweet say the account was unverified at the time so the rate limit was lower, but when you click on verified badge on their profile it says they've been verified since July 2021... weird.

https://twitter.com/DriveBC/status/1675600911782256640

The same thing happened a week ago in Hamburg/Germany when the fire department wanted to inform the local population about necessary evacuations for removal of World War II unexploded ordnance that were found during construction work. They had hit their Twitter limit and were unable to post the notice.

In German: https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-ha...

One of the oddities of living in Canada is the authorities overuse the amber alert system for when a divorced couple have a fight and someone takes the kids off in a hurry with no problem, but if someone is pretending to be a cop while shooting people and your actual cops are shooting up barns with innocent people hiding in then you're lucky if they Tweet about it. In fact two people died while they were getting permission to Tweet about it, but at least they weren't cops: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/canada-nova-sc...

I noticed something similar while visiting Texas last year. We have an Amber alert in my home state but it is triggered maybe 3 times/year.

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.

Yes, they can be annoying, but Texas has a pretty big population, and kidnappers can travel pretty quickly.

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.

Keep in mind there are types of alerts that can be triggered, emergency alerts and public broadcast alerts, amber alerts etc. You can toggle on and off what you want in the setting of the phone.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743

https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-turn-off-amber-alert...

You cannot - iPhones in Canada do not allow you to disable alerts.

Welp...As a Canadian (who doesn't live in Canada) all I can say is: Sorry.

Amazing, this is almost play-for-play the same screw up Verizon committed when they severely throttled the data usage of firefighters in California during the 2018 wildfires.[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

Don’t rely on a company’s free tier for anything truly critical.

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.

I'm glad this is forcing recognition of something that should have been obvious; private platforms should not be relied on for official government communication (or in my opinion used at all by government, but that's a longer argument).

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.

> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency.

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 agree. Post to all the places. I am annoyed that my local police dept posts regularly to a facebook page, behind a login. But not to twitter.

> I think governments should be using more platforms to blast their messages. Redundancy for mission critical messages is a good...

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.

i’m sure it seems like “everyone” is on twitter when you’re permanently online, but even the peak MAU figures don’t look anything like “everyone” in the US let alone the rest of the world.

any government messaging plan that revolves around twitter was irresponsible. same with whatever other single social media platform you want to name.

It’s almost as if the government messaging plan did not use a single social media platform, as the article very clearly describes.

> 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.

Something to be said for this not being used properly by BC gov. If they went over their limit then it was not well thought out, who has time in an emergency to read all those tweets to find one that is relevant to their locality?

I have to agree. I think it goes to show that a combination of bureaucracy and automation can be dangerous. Unfortunately, some person writing the tweets (or their bosses) might even think of the number of tweets, or more broadly the number of alerts, warnings and orders, etc, as some sort of perverted productivity metric.

Governments by law generally have the power to interrupt traditional media to put out emergency broadcasts. They could just as easily mandate that for any social media company/channel over a certain size to do business in the country, it must carry any emergency information the government puts out for free. It's important the information goes where the population is paying attention. If that requires laws to make happen, governments are pretty good at passing laws, though they're usually far too slow to make the right laws.

So this is about the API limits --- not what most readers would assume, that someone was typing furiously away sending out updates and ran into an error.

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.

Does anyone listen to the radio for Emergency Broadcasts? This is probably the best way to get info out to a lot of people quickly, there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't use twitter or social media. Could also send out mass txt messages like an amber alert sort of service to all mobile signals in the zone.

All kinds of public organizations (governments, fire departments, heads of state, etc.) have been using Twitter to broadcast news for the last fifteen years, as if it were a public utility. But it isn't. And many politicians have been complaining for years about social media not being regulated as such.

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-...

I find quite irresponsible to use social network as source of emergency news in first place.

Welp, that's terrible. Key question: how would a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub service) have fared here?

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

[0] https://voyent-alert.com/us/communities/municipalities/

> Welp, that's terrible. Key question: how would a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub service) have fared here?

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.

They would have posted and much fewer people would have seen the announcements. You have to go where the users are.

Wouldn’t geofenced SMS be a better solution than Twitter for this? Or maybe those Emergency Mobile Alerts?

If something less obtrusive is wanted, a simple push notification or webpage?

Maybe but I think it is more like how most people don't use SMS for messaging vs some kind of internet based app/ecosystem. SMS/telcos couldn't support what people needed, multimedia support, group chats etc. I think the use of Twitter and social media in general would be similar for these government groups. They just have better tools.

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.

> 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

Isn’t this the emergency alert notification? Or are you imagining something for situations where it isn’t an emergency but the information needs to be out there? If so, I’d be thinking a dedicated app is what’s needed.

Mastodon.nz fared very well during recent heavy rain events in New Zealand. Absolutely no tech limitations, and more importantly no arbitrary management-imposed limits.

Were 1500+ short form text messages per month really ever an effective means of communication for emergency purposes?

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.

Bc does have maps, both drive bc abs for wildfires https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee...

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

Government agencies should use RSS or ActivityPub for all their communications, it's unacceptable that they depend on a private company like Twitter for this sort of things.

How did we get to this point?

They send the info where the people are. People aren’t using RSS or ActivityPub at the same scale as Twitter.

Do both obviously

People use RSS for their podcasts, and they would use it for important government communications too if that was the official channel.

I would imagine that the choice of platform is tied to how many people have access to it - twitter is common, so is facebook, and twitter used to be open enough that one could see tweets even if not registered.

The real issue is not rapidly reacting to changes to the platform, such as immediately moving to a different platform, whatever it may be.

Generally speaking, by trying to communicate with people in ways that they will read.

I think the problem isn't so much that the infra is privately owned, but that it is privately owned and almost completely unregulated. Emergency vehicles frequently drive across toll bridges in many countries, say, and this is basically fine. What does _not_ generally happen is that they're stopped and told "sorry, the weird new owner of the bridge fired all the maintenance people, so we only have one lane open, and we have to prioritise someone called Cat Turd 2 driving across it, so go away". (The next day, the bridge collapses).

(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.)

We got to this point ... because people are cynical and negative about government provided public services ... and there's whole political parties who demand they be either dismantled or that if they have to exist they be outsourced and run by people who are either incompetent or have some patronage/political/business connection.

> How did we get to this point?

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.

Besides the cardinal rule of emergency management reporting, “go where the people are” It’s important to keep up to date with the capabilities and limitations of your lines of communications.

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.

Declare: eminent domain, public safety, national security, and for the children and seize the servers.

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…

Vendor Management is a critical component of an organization. Since the government was relying on Twitter to provide certain service levels and the government was paying for those negotiated services, this should be an easy win based on the contractual remedies that were pre-negotiated.

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.

If you aren't paying, is there really a formal customer/vendor relationship in the way you describe?

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.

Good. Take some tough medicine from this experience and then build public crisis management systems not owned by a product/profit-driven private corporation that’s loosely controlled by a completely separate country.

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.

Unclear from the article, but maybe they can just pay $8?

An expensive enterprise account is mentioned, but no linkage as to whether they would be forced to use it.

They could EASILY sign up for a Canadian Mastodon instance..... Or they could make their own Mastodon Govt instance.

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.

or they could write/buy software that interacts with the underlying ActivityPub protocol and not even use Mastodon itself.

For example, there's a wordpress ActivityPub plugin that will interoperate with many existing sites on the Fediverse.

Every phone in my office screeches a couple times a month with Amber Alerts for missing children several hours away from my location. We already have a channel for mass broadcasting emergency alerts to every mobile device. Why was Twitter ever the platform of choice for this?

Amber alerts are about immediacy of action.

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

> alerts to every mobile device

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.

Doesn’t Canada have a country- or state-wide emergency alert system that involves sending messages directly to people’s phones? (including “dumb” ones). Because that would make a lot more sense than relying on a private app, or on any app, for that matter.

Where are all those fanboys who whenever Elon would make a bone headed move, they would correct you about how no Elon is a genius and here's why. I desperately want to hear what they have to say this time.

Was social media ever a reliable platform during emergencies?

Yes, almost impressively so.

This should be a big embarrassment for Twitter.

Surprisingly so. It is particularly effective at reaching an audience who no longer consumes much “traditional” media like TV and radio. A multipronged approach is needed when trying to reach as many people as possible.

I have questions:

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.

> Lazily relying on Twitter

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.

Counterpoint, if a government is relying on a novelty microblog website for apparently important infrastructure, the website should probably be informed of this.

1. Twitter has existed since 2006, I'm sure they are very well aware of governments utilizing their platform since then.

2. How do you expect governments to provide information? Should they:

a. Distribute information via the most widely consumed forms of media

b. Create individual platforms so that people have to check a unique website to stay upddated on each government ministry

3. Twitter may be a "novelty microblog website" in a global sense, but in North America calling it that is absurd.

I don't know what happened. There's no information in the article other than a government rep saying that they're relying on private infrastructure as if it were public. I would like answers to those questions. I'm suggesting that the government should make an attempt to solve a problem, if it's actually a problem.

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.

I mean if the account was not verified, how would Twitter know that it really is the government and not some guy who is squatting the handle ?

The article leads off with "Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency."

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.

What crap: Musk also prevented people from viewing tweets during the same period. Couldn't see Tweets if you didn't have an account (you still can't browse, only see a specific linked tweet), and even if you did you were limited to 600 a day.

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?

push your elected officials to adopt policy requiring public sector agencies make use of ActivityPub oriented services, whether they're Mastodon, Pixelfed, or even just WordPress with the AP plugin installed.

This has been a huge problem with Twitter, noted by many in the emergency communications sector going back at least 2 years or longer.

Why isn’t there funding for public social media? Doesn’t Germany and the Netherlands run their own Mastodon instances?

1.500 tweets per month are 50 tweets per day, every day. Do people really follow when they get flooded like that?

> Do people really follow when they get flooded like that?

They probably don't know that anything else is possible.

> Twitter did not respond to Glacier Media's questions.

They probably responded... with a poop emoji.

Sounds like they learned proprietary infra doesn't pass for public infra the hard way.

radio stations are already used for this, this isn't a failing of twitter imo

maybe, just maybe government should not depend on private for-profit companies for essential communication

You should NOT be relying on something like Twitter for an emergency announcement system. That is just asinine.

Bring back radios.

SMS.

People still use twitter?

Did they pay the $8 fee for a blue check? The limits are a lot lower if they didn’t…

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