Turns out they used twitter because that's where the users were.
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.
What Twitter was is better than Facebook, the main other governmental alert platform.
That is illegal in B.C.
Well, apart from the app
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.
In other words, 'website' is visited. Information is accessed and sent back to the requester.
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.
That said, does it change twitter's status as a website that just happens to have functionality X ( push notifications )?
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.
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.
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.
A government agency governing what is acceptable speech is a bad idea.
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.
This exists, and is called Wireless Emergency Alerts. Every phone sold in the U.S. today supports this out of the box.
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.
You work for who pays you.
Platforms that censor are going to win in the marketplace, because that’s what most people want in a discussion platform.
Twitter was fantastic for that kind of thing though.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This does not counter argument that the GGP comment is incorrect in labelling these systems "mostly useless"
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.
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.
[1] https://kutv.com/news/local/law-introduced-for-new-criteria-...
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.
For example in Ontario, every alert is sent out at this authority.