Why do they need social networks for that? Just set up an oldschool website and post stuff there.
"DriveBC has a dedicated website, but many access its automated messages through its Twitter account, a platform accessed by more than a quarter of Canadians in 2023, according to the company’s advertising data."
The issue is no-one is going to know about that website whereas a tweet it likely to get retweeted by other residents.
That’s where people are.
The number of people hanging out on some government website is probably low.
The person tasked with warning is probably concerned with getting the word out to as many people as possible and less so how we would like things to be (not have to use twitter).
If this was only announced via some obscure website we would be wondering why they didn't just tweet it out / why the government would expect people to just find some random website and refresh it all day.
I mean take power outages. I have to figure out the website every time there's an outage then wait for them to actually update it, whereas Twitter already had pictures of the substation that was on fire.
Convincing people to return to websites for this kind of thing is boiling the ocean.
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.
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?
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.
Ideally a government-run emergency broadcast website would have literally 0 social features.
> 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.
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” ;)