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Comment by zerodensity | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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