Twitter is hot garbage, that’s only gotten worse since Elon took over, but this is really just a problem with government agencies/departments using social media websites as primary avenues of delivering information.
Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old
Submitted 4 months ago by phoneymouse@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.wired.com/story/amber-alert-paywall-california/
Comments
effward@lemmy.world 4 months ago
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
Dear fucking god this is the real issue and why Mastodon is the solution because the agencies can have their own self-hosted presence. Is it perfect by any stretch? Oh fuck no, but it’s a lot closer to those groups having an independence and not relying on the corporations good graces for any of it to keep functioning.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 4 months ago
this is really just a problem with government agencies/departments using social media websites as primary avenues of delivering information.
I guarantee that this was not a “primary avenue” for delivering this information.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I believe the alert popped up on the phone with the link, which people could not see.
QubaXR@lemmy.world 4 months 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.
dabaldeagul@feddit.nl 4 months 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 4 months ago
I hope many organizations and groups follow suit.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today 4 months ago
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.
ryannathans@aussie.zone 4 months ago
Our police do the same in Australia with Facebook and I can’t view them
CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yes this happened to me and my wife.
Alert came in one the phone (screaming at us really) then when you clicked on the notification. Bam blocked because we didn’t have a twitter account.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 4 months ago
Can you share a screenshot of the alert? If it’s an android phone, you can find historical alerts under “Settings”.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 4 months ago
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
This is what happens when governments rely on a private corporate service for public announcements
Every government should just adopt a fediverse instance of some sort, maintain it and push that to everyone to use as a public announcement service. That way it would not be controlled, manipulated, lost or disconnected if they had full control over it all the time.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 4 months ago
The government uses EAS and WEA to disseminate alerts. Both are government-operated systems that are not controlled, manipulated, lost, or disconnected by third parties. The AMBER alert in question was delivered via both EAS and WEA.
The Xhitter avenue (along with every other major social media platform) is what they refer to as a “secondary distributor”.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
According to the article, that was not done in this case, hence the article.
umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Except the primary distributor doesn’t have any actionable details.
spyd3r@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Don’t worry they spam everyone’s cell phones with deafening alerts at 3am too.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
Thankfully all but the shitty national ones can be turned off on most Android phones.
rational_lib@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can’t find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions, but the top post was “trail is open, come on in!” because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.
There should be some non-profit funded by cities that’s basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.
Ulrich@feddit.org 4 months ago
RSS is as old as the internet but it’s been effectively killed, except for the websites that host it accidentally.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 4 months ago
RSS really should be more common.
You use your get RSS feeds for Twitter accounts. AFAIR. So Twitter accounts were effectively RSS notification feeds at one point.
Aaron Swartz was involved in developing RSS v1.0 too, cofounder of Reddit.
plz1@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The mobile carriers and device OEM’s already participate directly in the Amber alert program. Why is X even part of this?
simplejack@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The problem isn’t the alert itself, it’s that cops put Twitter links in the alert. If you want to see what the car, suspect, or victim look like, you need to be able to access Twitter.
Police have been doing this for years now. It’s a fast a cheap way to microblog without buying or supporting something with the city’s budget.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Can’t have those ticket funds going to digital infrastructure when you gotta get up armored trucks to deal with protesters.
UncleGrandPa@lemmy.world 4 months ago
“Stat tuned for an important Government Announcement!”
Deposit $1 to continue
Pika@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
please drink your verification can and post your hourly “Musk is the best” post to continue
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 4 months ago
Why the hell would they make the alert link to a post on anything instead of just having the relevant info in the alert? I’ve had at least 2 amber alerts come through and a few earthquake warnings as well, and they just had all the info you needed in the alert pop up itself.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
One more example of a private service being used as if it were a utility.
This one is especially egregious considering it’s an Amber Alert, but it isn’t necessarily unique. Despite the internet being designed as open, it has been taken over by private entities, and any popular service is ultimately controlled by such entities.
It’s a hard problem to solve. Look at federated platforms like Lemmy: they take a long time to populate, and their usefulness is partly a function of how successful that population is. By definition, a free, open platform will not have the advertising, reach, or “it factor” of a corporate service. When given the choice between an open platform and a corporate one, we see people choose the corporate one time and time again.
We have taken our open network and handed it, willingly, to private enterprise.
njordomir@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I think a good first step would be to require all public services and similar to transition to FOSS software only. Schools, governments, public health, etc, should not, generally speaking, be in the business of making money for private interests, nor should our data be stored in these black boxes. If we don’t own it; it owns us. Sure that’s a huge departure from current reality, but I see it as fairly clear cut. I’m sure people will say I go too far.
frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe 4 months ago
The federal government does or at least did have a decent in-house open source dev team (legally, work done by the us government has a copyright which belongs to the people, making it roughly open source). The us government is also filled with people who believe that any failure to extract profit is a failure at life, so the government also outsources a bunch of work to priv companies which do retain their copyrights, but it’s not required.
belit_deg@lemmy.world 4 months ago
jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I had no idea this shit depended on twitter!?!? what a bunch of bullshit. Even though I usually ignore amber alerts they should at the very least be as accessible as possible for people who help.
helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today 4 months ago
they should at the very least be as accessible as possible for people who help.
They’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, the link in the amber alert led to a Twitter post that anyone could view. It wasn’t until musk recently making it so you have to make an account in order to see posts which makes me surprised this hasn’t been brought up sooner
markstos@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Ironically, when I tried to load Wired’s story about this travesty, Wired quickly hid the content with pop-over asking me to subscribe.
joyjoy@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Twitter has become the worst place to post about status updates. Logged out users aren’t able to see recent posts, so it’s useless.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 months ago
I don’t see this as Twitter/X’s fault (very much), I mostly blame them for linking to a Tweet instead of just sending the details in the Amber alert. Or, here’s a bright idea, why no both? Send the details and a link to a tweet for updates.
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Why are they surprised that someone who is highly sympathetic to sex offenders would want them to get away from their crimes.
Methinks that Elon would tote the security of a Tesla, but something tells me that if a sex offender or child kidnapper were to take it, the sensors would stop updating and it would release a lot of DNA destroying enzymes in the interior and exterior that would destroy crucial evidence inside and outside the vehicle.
frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe 4 months ago
Paragraph one: agreed, Elon musk loves sex offenders and probably is one. Love this paragraph.
Paragraph two jumped the shark.
asteriskeverything@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I haven’t been able to even* load* Facebook or X because of some privacy/security setting I must have enabled. Before that fb wouldn’t let me see anything without an account and X was pulling really similar stunts, requiring an account for full access, although usually you could read the tweet and a few replies maybe.
It is absolutely bullshit for ALL the information to be on a social media post. I’ve definitely gotten them before with age and suspect/vehicle or something, and Twitter would have photos and further details like last seen location and clothes.
Amoxtli@thelemmy.club 4 months ago
I don’t X anyways. All notifications are blocked.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 4 months ago
You would have gotten this one, because it was a Wireless Emergency Alert, not a Xhitter notification.
Amoxtli@thelemmy.club 4 months ago
Bro. Just use SMS for that stuff.
umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
I wonder why such an important piece of info is posted on social media but not on a dedicated webpage that can be linked to any social media posts.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yay, privatization? Just post it to a social media platform so the official org doesn’t have to dedicate IT resources or further effort to it?
spongebue@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I mean, it’s not like people would check that dedicated webpage on their own, and they are less likely to click on that webpage to get the additional details. Just put it on the platform most people are using and don’t add extra steps to see what’s needed.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 4 months ago
if you read the article, you’d find out that the alert linked to the X post. it could be linking to a dedicated webpage instead, which wouldn’t require logging in.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Most, but not all people should be a deal breaker for a public service announcement.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That was my take. Still is, but was before, too, although I have concerns about it. I don’t even use xitter. It’s an unfortunate conundrum and I don’t know the answer. We are clearly seeing the results of channeling government communications through private platforms where information can be gatekept. But what’s the alternative? I agree that the government website should be the primary source and private platforms the secondary source, but, much in the way US-market cars hide the “real” tail lights in/under the trunk in order to put “aux” tail lights on moving trunk/tailgate panels, that’s just not how the general public will use it.
People want to be entertained. Getting info through private media is the most we can hope for. People don’t want to get real news media, let alone their local government’s attempt at a blog site. I know we get amber alerts direct from the cell network to some unique software on phones, but I imagine rolling out some more-frequent alert system will cause a ton of privacy/freedom backlash crying about being one goosestep away from China.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Social media has a very good ratio of information spreading versus effort required. It’s also why it’s a popular thing for misinformation and influence campaigns.
In contrast, if a government agency wants to make a website for this, it probably needs a proposal, budget request, approval by a commission, a bidding process, and other bureaucatic procedures put in place by politicians that wanted to lower spending.
umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
And we got news like this.