Comment on Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old
QubaXR@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I mean fuck X, sure, but why is the police posting crucial information on a commercial, privately moderated platform? Why would you just assume everyone has an account with Musk’s service?
I’ve seen this shit in Europe too - with everyone just assuming you’ll have WhatsApp. At least most EU governments don’t use it exclusively, but I’m certain countries, like Turkey, WhatsApp is the only channel where information can often be found.
It never fails to frustrate and shock me when I see public entities relying on private software and platforms.
My local schools rely heavily on Windows and Google. Important Govermental notices are shared on Twitter first.
This is nuts. I really think public infrastructure should be mandatorily tied to open and free solutions.
This is part of the fall of Twitter.
There were two paths for Twitter, in the eyes of many idealistic people like me. One path was something terrible like what happened with Musk. The second path was one that treated it as a public commons of the world.
That second path is how many grew to understand Twitter during its rise and peak. This is why there are so many situations where various public and governmental groups used it as a notification feed/system.
You can go on about how they should just start their own ActivityPub based solution, or move to bluesky or whatever. But it’s not that simple.
The article could have easily been just as absurd if it was about how people didn’t get the alert because the alerts were moved to a mastodon instance and people are upset because they don’t want to have to go through the trouble of picking a server. heh.
It’s so unfortunate that Twitter went this way. No more free and easy api, no more third party apps and tools. No more expectation that everyone is there. No more expectation that public alerts make sense there.
Yes, centralizing all of this is a big problem. And musk is just one example of why. But, it could have gone the other way.
The article could have easily been just as absurd if it was about how people didn’t get the alert because the alerts were moved to a mastodon instance and people are upset because they don’t want to have to go through the trouble of picking a server. heh.
You can view mastodon posts without being forced to make an account. This use to be the case with Twitter before it was turned into X.
Our police do the same in Australia with Facebook and I can’t view them
Amber alerts do go out via phone alerts to everyone in the area. They’re probably just supplementing that with a Twitter post since you can refer back to it.
dabaldeagul@feddit.nl 2 days ago
The Dutch government used Twitter for a lot of information (though this was often if not always found on their own websites as well), but now they host their own Mastodon instance for any gov related stuff that can be used by government agencies in conjunction with or as a replacement for Twitter. Which is pretty cool imo.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I hope many organizations and groups follow suit.