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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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.

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