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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Is this the first time a citizen has been required to accept an EULA to receive official government communications?

I have the feeling that the legality of this involves a bunch of concepts I don't know about.

E.g., what constitutes an official communication, and how accessible they're legally required to be.

I have no idea but I find it hard to believe that announcing government policy on a billionaire's platform is a really bad idea when a basic web page could do the same thing. How hard could it be to emulate a message stream on a .gov site that has the features of X? There have to be dozens of open source packages out there that could do it, and then they control it. At any point, twitter could shut down the stream and it would take weeks to months to set up a site to replace it.

I don't think it's the first time. Ever since all these stupid idiotic SMS confirmations became a trend they've all effectively required you to accept a {Verizon, AT&T, T-mobile} EULA.

That said though EULAs aren't law. If it's just a contract between two parties, you are free to violate it and they are free to violate it as well.

Contracts (government-enforceable agreements) are private law.

If an attorney sues the king, they get banished from courts. There is no law.

Twitter has a Government EULA so agencies do have official accounts in line with regulation. That said, the agency itself is responsible for preserving its records in a way required by law, and is also typically required to post official requests and changes to the Federal Record.

the question wasn't about the (government) account holder's EULA, the question was whether citizens have to accept Twitter's regular EULA in order to view the posts.

can I scrape government Twitter accounts and mirror them without paying Elon for API access? because I can scrape ssa.gov just fine.

Forget scraping. I can't read Twitter, as I don't have an account. A normal person is now locked out of SSA communications unless they sign up for Twitter.

Good point. Unsure. I guess it depends on whether embedded content implies users have accepted a EULA? I'd imagine they will cross-post to their web page as well, but who knows.

My private employer requires us to login with our credentials to view communications from our CEO. Seems shady to me.

> My private employer requires us to login with our credentials to view communications from our CEO. Seems shady to me.

I assume the last sentence was insincere.

Your employer requires you to log in to view internal communications. Not public. And citizens employ the government. Not vice versa.

Worse is having to personally agree to third-party privacy policies to use tools at work. For example, if you use google docs, you have to agree to google's privacy policy, which can match at work and outside work behavior.

schools do the same thing, but 1000% worse.

Oh, and online tax stuff or dmv? all logs into google.

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