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B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations

346 points by nosecreek 3y ago

sigzero 3y ago
You should NOT be relying on something like Twitter for an emergency announcement system. That is just asinine.
pbronez 3y ago
Welp, that's terrible. Key question: how would a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub service) have fared here? There are companies that offer alert broadcasting services (e.g., [0]). Have any of them started to support ActivityPub? Could they make 1:m focused platforms that implement a subset of the standard really well? Do we need to define a subset of ActivityPub that increases efficiency for this kind of mass communication? I have no answers, only questions [0] https://voyent-alert.com/us/communities/municipalities/ https://voyent-alert.com/us/communities/municipalities/
- phoe-krk 3y ago
  > Welp, that's terrible. Key question: how would a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub service) have fared here? For once, no hardcoded tweet/toot limit. The only limitation would be the network - the ability for toots to leave the home instance as they're pushed to other instances. Given the current size of mastodon.social (the largest Mastodon instance) and its ability to push toots out to other instances (including mine) despite the size of m.s, I don't think it would be an issue in the current circumstances.
- mpalczewski 3y ago
  They would have posted and much fewer people would have seen the announcements. You have to go where the users are.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  Wouldn’t geofenced SMS be a better solution than Twitter for this? Or maybe those Emergency Mobile Alerts? If something less obtrusive is wanted, a simple push notification or webpage?
  - RustomMS 3y ago
    Maybe but I think it is more like how most people don't use SMS for messaging vs some kind of internet based app/ecosystem. SMS/telcos couldn't support what people needed, multimedia support, group chats etc. I think the use of Twitter and social media in general would be similar for these government groups. They just have better tools. I think the best approach is to still use Twitter but also use all Social Media like Facebook (especially), Insta (hard to do for text) but you could link to their Website with the same posts/info. In the end you have to try and inform the public where they are, just like would happen on TV or Radio in the past. Maybe it is actually a space for Google/Apple/Microsoft/Linux as OS makers to provide some functionality to do this kind of broadcasting over the internet in addition to working with Telcos for SMS/mobile based alerting.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      > Maybe it is actually a space for Google/Apple/Microsoft/Linux as OS makers to provide some functionality to do this kind of broadcasting over the internet Isn’t this the emergency alert notification? Or are you imagining something for situations where it isn’t an emergency but the information needs to be out there? If so, I’d be thinking a dedicated app is what’s needed.
- foxylad 3y ago
  Mastodon.nz fared very well during recent heavy rain events in New Zealand. Absolutely no tech limitations, and more importantly no arbitrary management-imposed limits.
alenrozac 3y ago
People will blame Twitter, but imho, a public agency should not rely solely on scale provided to it by a single private platform. It looks like they recognize it too: > “We've been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications,” said Reynolds. “But it really doesn't work once things change.”
- brookst 3y ago
  Were they exclusively using Twitter, or offering it as one of many channels so people could choose how to receive info? The former is a terrible idea, the latter is great (until things change). I frequently drive a sometimes closed section of road with flashing “tune to AM 560 for road info” signs. It would be great if there were “follow DOT on [service]” options.
  - JTon 3y ago
    Doubtful. Canada has emergency alert systems in place over AM and FM radio, over Broadcast TV, and over SMS/cellphone. Those are the systems I'm aware of, but there may be more.
    - katbyte 3y ago
      In bc there is drivebc which is the source of truth for road conditions (with webcams) There are also status pages for bcferries translink and wildfires Wildfires has a webpage https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map An app, and a map https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee385abe2a41b https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee...
  - e-shrdlu 3y ago
    It looks like they had a website too, but most people went to twitter for updates
- helen___keller 3y ago
  Agreed, this was already a frustration of mine. There’s been a scroll limit on Twitter from forever ago, and the most frustration I’ve experienced with social media is realizing I had to sign up for twitter if I wanted to look at the public communications going back a few hours by my local police department (at the time there was a manhunt in my neighborhood and we were being advised to stay indoors. I was spooked.)
mcv 3y ago
> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency. I'm glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this. Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start.
- BossingAround 3y ago
  Can't they just send emergency text messages? Good ol' SMS. They should be able to use phone infrastructure for emergency notifications.
  - BenisMaximus 3y ago
    What if the phone infrastructure goes down for any reason? Having the data backup is smart because many of these folks have satellite internet even when their phones don't work.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Why do they need social networks for that? Just set up an oldschool website and post stuff there.
  - jarebear6expepj 3y ago
    Define social network. I agree, and would personally consider public websites, old and new school, to be social networks.
    - blitz_skull 3y ago
      Yeah, not me. That's a website. It's a pretty distinct technological entity, that has nothing to do with "social" networking which has been defined during the past 20 years as a single website with "social" sharing capabilities. Ideally a government-run emergency broadcast website would have literally 0 social features.
ndlan 3y ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  The tool was fit for this purpose for years, and as a result widely used for said purpose. Twitter here is like a hammer that suddenly refuses to pound nails.
  - acheron 3y ago
    Twitter has never been good for this purpose. Back when blue checks were unusual, you could tell who Twitter cared about: government accounts were “unverified”, but of course every 22 year old Gawker intern had one.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      ? Twitter was theoretically not good for this purpose, but in practice was actually quite good. Which is, of course, what matters here in reality. The status fixation on blue checks is so fucking absurd.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    It is like a hammer you purchased on finance at zero interest whose hardware store suddenly wants the hammer back now that rates have gone up, or you pay interest to carry on using said hammer.
- b3lvedere 3y ago
  Man uses tool and finds out it works awesome. Other man buys and modifies said tool. Man needs to search another tool.
neom 3y ago
Loads of people commenting under their tweet say the account was unverified at the time so the rate limit was lower, but when you click on verified badge on their profile it says they've been verified since July 2021... weird. https://twitter.com/DriveBC/status/1675600911782256640 https://twitter.com/DriveBC/status/1675600911782256640
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
zapkyeskrill 3y ago
[flagged]
uncertainrhymes 3y ago
Twitter is terrible ... except it is still the best real-time broadcast tool available to governments and those without IT staff and budgets. Most local groups around me just stopped trying, or reverted to Facebook. They used it because it was free and easy -- the idea they could build their own alternative and get people to follow it is just impossible for them. During some recent fires near me the official communication was confused and awful. One retired firefighter just decided to tweet status updates from listening to the operations radio and he became the most reliable source around. At least the mobile phone alerts worked for evacuations.
pera 3y ago
Government agencies should use RSS or ActivityPub for all their communications, it's unacceptable that they depend on a private company like Twitter for this sort of things. How did we get to this point?
- exegete 3y ago
  They send the info where the people are. People aren’t using RSS or ActivityPub at the same scale as Twitter.
  - 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
    Do both obviously
  - pera 3y ago
    People use RSS for their podcasts, and they would use it for important government communications too if that was the official channel.
- lionkor 3y ago
  I would imagine that the choice of platform is tied to how many people have access to it - twitter is common, so is facebook, and twitter used to be open enough that one could see tweets even if not registered. The real issue is not rapidly reacting to changes to the platform, such as immediately moving to a different platform, whatever it may be.
- eropple 3y ago
  Generally speaking, by trying to communicate with people in ways that they will read.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I think the problem isn't so much that the infra is privately owned, but that it is privately owned and almost completely unregulated. Emergency vehicles frequently drive across toll bridges in many countries, say, and this is basically fine. What does _not_ generally happen is that they're stopped and told "sorry, the weird new owner of the bridge fired all the maintenance people, so we only have one lane open, and we have to prioritise someone called Cat Turd 2 driving across it, so go away". (The next day, the bridge collapses). (Arguably something like this did kind of happen with the UK's rail system, with the end result that Railtrack (the private company which John Major had rather unwisely sold the network to and then failed to regulate properly) was effectively re-nationalised.)
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
Don’t rely on a company’s free tier for anything truly critical. Either self-host your own solution, built on open source dependencies, or pay a company on a plan with an SLA that meets your needs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
111111IIIIIII 3y ago
[flagged]
- cornercasechase 3y ago
  It’s barely capitalism. A guy who made his money with government handouts and bribing the SEC so he can commit fraud used his ill gotten gains to purchase a profitable company. Then he burned that company to the ground and made it permanently unprofitable. It’s capitalism in its most distorted sense.
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    You just described capitalism
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Profitable?
  - zerodensity 3y ago
    I do find it unnerving that a single unelected person can have this kind of power in a democracy.
  - 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
    That's just capitalism.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      "Barely capitalism" is what "capitalism" becomes without a baby sitter.
      - 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
        The babysitter is always capital itself, hence why it's called capitalism. Sometimes the babysitter gets distracted or gives in for a while, but it always comes back and it always has the final word.
api 3y ago
Was social media ever a reliable platform during emergencies?
- ink_13 3y ago
  Yes, almost impressively so. This should be a big embarrassment for Twitter.
- brewdad 3y ago
  Surprisingly so. It is particularly effective at reaching an audience who no longer consumes much “traditional” media like TV and radio. A multipronged approach is needed when trying to reach as many people as possible.
hermannj314 3y ago
Vendor Management is a critical component of an organization. Since the government was relying on Twitter to provide certain service levels and the government was paying for those negotiated services, this should be an easy win based on the contractual remedies that were pre-negotiated. I mean the BC government is hundreds of years old so they know all of this so it should be a pretty easy win for them. It isn't like this is a new thing.
- acyou 3y ago
  If you aren't paying, is there really a formal customer/vendor relationship in the way you describe? There is just as good of a case to be made that the BC government was the "vendor" here, by indirectly delivering users to Twitter for decades, for free, by using the private platform for exclusive, official communications. Or that that was the "payment". BC government would have agreed to TOS, like everyone else, which likely state Twitter can change service levels at an time.
stainablesteel 3y ago
radio stations are already used for this, this isn't a failing of twitter imo
apozem 3y ago
Yet another example of how these new Twitter API limits are self-defeating and poorly considered. A far-sighted Twitter owner would want as many government agencies and news alerts on the platform as possible. The cost giving them API access is dwarfed by the value of making Twitter the place for real-time information. That's the whole point of Twitter. These agencies provide value to Twitter, not vice versa. Asking them to pay means you don't understand that.
- neom 3y ago
  This isn't about the API. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limits https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...
  - notRobot 3y ago
    > Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, however, Twitter has put new rules in place that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying. The move was carried out partly as a response to rising concerns artificial intelligence platforms would use the historical archives of social media platforms to train their large language models. From TFA. Seems like this is about the API?
    - neom 3y ago
      I think the author is conflating, the API limits are not temporary, but the new tweet limit imposed by the app are, and DriveBC specifically said "have exceeded the temporarily imposed post rate limit" - I emailed the author for clarification, but I'm fairly sure he's conflating. EDIT: I emailed the author and he said it's a mistake - he's updating the article.
      - notRobot 3y ago
        Very cool! :)
- helen___keller 3y ago
skizm 3y ago
> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency. I draw the opposite conclusion here. I think governments should be using more platforms to blast their messages. Redundancy for mission critical messages is a good thing. They should be using both their own app / infra plus all other social medias that are available. Update your website, RSS feed, send whatsapp messages, send an instagram message, send a tweet, post to your facebook, etc. If someone doesn't want socials, there should be ways to opt-in to texts or phone calls. Ideally they can have one place to enter the message on their end, and a bunch of checkboxes to which socials / channels to post a message too. Behind the scenes it will apply appropriate transformations for specific platforms if necessary (turn words into an image for instagram, split posts if longer than the twitter limit, etc.).
- softwaredoug 3y ago
  I agree. Post to all the places. I am annoyed that my local police dept posts regularly to a facebook page, behind a login. But not to twitter.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  > I think governments should be using more platforms to blast their messages. Redundancy for mission critical messages is a good... I'd assume that gov't resources are limited. Especially during major emergencies, when little local municipal governments are usually the ones on the front lines during the most dangerous phases. Maintaining "all of the above" social media accounts during emergencies does not sound compatible with that realty.
t0bia_s 3y ago
I find quite irresponsible to use social network as source of emergency news in first place.
romusha 3y ago
People still use twitter?
cubefox 3y ago
1.500 tweets per month are 50 tweets per day, every day. Do people really follow when they get flooded like that?
- reportgunner 3y ago
  > Do people really follow when they get flooded like that? They probably don't know that anything else is possible.
fidotron 3y ago
One of the oddities of living in Canada is the authorities overuse the amber alert system for when a divorced couple have a fight and someone takes the kids off in a hurry with no problem, but if someone is pretending to be a cop while shooting people and your actual cops are shooting up barns with innocent people hiding in then you're lucky if they Tweet about it. In fact two people died while they were getting permission to Tweet about it, but at least they weren't cops: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/canada-nova-scotia-mass-shooting-tweet-public-inquiry https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/canada-nova-sc...
- gwright 3y ago
  I noticed something similar while visiting Texas last year. We have an Amber alert in my home state but it is triggered maybe 3 times/year. When I was in Texas I received the alert 3 or 4 times in a couple of days. The people I was visiting seemed to think that was typical. It seemed to me that the alerts weren't very localized.
  - gunapologist99 3y ago
    Yes, they can be annoying, but Texas has a pretty big population, and kidnappers can travel pretty quickly. Law enforcement can't see everything, even if they have a "BOLO" (be on the lookout), but with millions of people on the roads, someone might spot the kidnapper's vehicle.) Issuing Amber Alerts sooner rather than later (or not at all) is optimal and the Amber Alert system in Texas has definitely resulted in some child rescues before those kids disappeared forever, especially if they have plate numbers or descriptions.
- neom 3y ago
  Keep in mind there are types of alerts that can be triggered, emergency alerts and public broadcast alerts, amber alerts etc. You can toggle on and off what you want in the setting of the phone. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743 https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-turn-off-amber-alerts-android-800435/ https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-turn-off-amber-alert...
voxadam 3y ago
Amazing, this is almost play-for-play the same screw up Verizon committed when they severely throttled the data usage of firefighters in California during the 2018 wildfires.[0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...
mhandley 3y ago
Governments by law generally have the power to interrupt traditional media to put out emergency broadcasts. They could just as easily mandate that for any social media company/channel over a certain size to do business in the country, it must carry any emergency information the government puts out for free. It's important the information goes where the population is paying attention. If that requires laws to make happen, governments are pretty good at passing laws, though they're usually far too slow to make the right laws.
shkkmo 3y ago
The article leads off with "Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency." But later down the article admits: > Twitter has put new rules in place that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying So if the B.C. government had bothered paying for the service rather than relying on a free account to disemminate mission critical info, there would have been no issue. So this is really just yet another biased Twitter hit piece rather than actual journalism.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  What crap: Musk also prevented people from viewing tweets during the same period. Couldn't see Tweets if you didn't have an account (you still can't browse, only see a specific linked tweet), and even if you did you were limited to 600 a day. It's not a public service. It should never have been used that way. People need to stop posting twitter feeds as generally accessible things, and treat Twitter like a private site that it is. Anyways, thank you Musk for teaching the public that they were using it wrong. Now they can demand their governments actually create proper services for the public instead of relying on his stuff. Now if kids schools etc could stop using Facebook groups too? Wouldn't that be nice?
blywi 3y ago
The same thing happened a week ago in Hamburg/Germany when the fire department wanted to inform the local population about necessary evacuations for removal of World War II unexploded ordnance that were found during construction work. They had hit their Twitter limit and were unable to post the notice. In German: https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-hamburg-wird-waehrend-bombenentschaerfung-eingeschraenkt-CAA6NRUEHZA4DDP7DSCHNUL2FM.html https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-ha...
ibejoeb 3y ago
I have questions: 1. Does Twitter even know about this? 2. Did the transportation minister bring this to Twitter? I mean, if it's such a big deal, is it worth a ring, email, or DM? 3. Did Twitter refuse to uncap it? I don't know if the reporting is sloppy, or if there is an agenda, or whatever, but there are acknowledgements by the government that they were lazily relying on Twitter without any kind of formal arrangement. If I'm handling comms for the ministry, I would go to twitter with a public weal request that it designates critical information accounts with no practical rate limits and that are visible to all without sign-in. They have the capability. Someone needs to initiate it.
- usednet 3y ago
  > Lazily relying on Twitter I don't think that every government ministry or important figure should be expected to have to proactively reach out to Twitter and make a "formal arrangement" to avoid being rate limited on one of the world's primary sources of real-time information. This is simply a bad standard to set. Nevermind that, the rate limits were implemented a week ago so calling it lazy to not have a "formal arrangement" in place in less than a week is silly, especially considering that Twitter support's response times right now are atrocious.
  - dmonitor 3y ago
    Counterpoint, if a government is relying on a novelty microblog website for apparently important infrastructure, the website should probably be informed of this.
    - usednet 3y ago
      1. Twitter has existed since 2006, I'm sure they are very well aware of governments utilizing their platform since then. 2. How do you expect governments to provide information? Should they: a. Distribute information via the most widely consumed forms of media b. Create individual platforms so that people have to check a unique website to stay upddated on each government ministry 3. Twitter may be a "novelty microblog website" in a global sense, but in North America calling it that is absurd.
logshipper 3y ago
I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how its the government's fault for relying on a private service for public communications. The sentiment, while understandable (and not entirely unfair), assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$. A Twitter account (well, before the Musk takeover anyway) offered: a) The ability to disseminate information to essentially anyone with a mobile device and an internet connection. b) Low setup costs, maintenance overhead, and technical expertise needed. As a taxpayer, I would like my government to be cost-effective in resource allocation - Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way to maintain a 1-->many communications infrastructure. That said, I fully agree that they should explore alternatives in light of Musk's antics. It is important to also remember that government can be slow when it comes to embracing tech. ActivityPub is only 5 years old, and that's a short-time by govt standards, RSS is effectively (and quite sadly) dead for the everyday folk. This may or may not surprise the readership here, but Ontario's healthcare system still uses faxes to transmit patient records: https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate-fax-machines-within-next-five-years-to-promote-patient#:~:text=To%20Health%20Care-,Ontario%20Government%20To%20Eliminate%20Fax%20Machines%20Within%20The%20Next%20Five,And%20Access%20To%20Health%20Care&text=On%20February%202%2C%202023%2C%20Ontario%27s,Convenient%20Care%20(the%20Plan) https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate....
- mxuribe 3y ago
  It is the gov's fault for relying on a service...that lacked a formal legal agreement that favors the gov, and even better that favors the citizens who pay taxes to said gov. But, i am not going to fault the gov folks too much, because hey they're human, and also because i'm pretty sure that the gov's intent (in deciding to use mechanisms like twitter) were not evil, quite the contrary no doubt. I fault such governments not because they're thinking evil, but rather poor decision-making. Also, you make a valid point that gov entities often lack enough tech personnel...However, i feel gov entities should at least have some small numbers of tech personnel who - not only install hardware, software - but advise governments on what technologies could fit the very specific needs of the citizens. Corporations for years/decades have technology advisors on staff; basically IT/tech/digital folks who don't go anywhere near software/hardware, and instead advise corporate entities on leveraging the most appropriate tech solutions for whatever scenarios come up for said corpporations. What any gov should always ask themselves in cases of deciding for platforms for emergency use: what mechanisms do we need in place that will scale to provide the service (emergency comms and/or broadcast) that our citizens need, etc.. To your point about having gov. be cost-effective, i fully agree with you! While i happily (yes, happily!) pay my taxes when gov uses them to good use (because it helps everyone in the long-term even if they dont realize it), i dislike poor decision-making by govs when they waste my tax dollars. So, i think the issue is not so much that govs can not afford to make long-term proper decisions of choosing scalable, appropriate tech platforms...but rather, that many govs simply make poor choices, or don't know how to make a choice, and then rely on ther wrong people to help make bad choices. As the point about faxes...the U.S. also relies on fax as the approved "private" communcation system within healthcare...Not because gov doesn't move fast enough nor because someone made a bad tech decisioin...but we use faxes in american healthcare because someone made a bad tech decision AND THEN proceeded to explicityl cement that decision into law! Overall, i blame gov, but not too roughly...but i also blame our gov/political leaders for not thinking properly long-term, and often relying too much on private entities...entities who do not always have the same incentives alignbed with citizens. Ok, ok, i'm off my soap box now. Thanks for your patience! :-)
dudeinjapan 3y ago
Did they pay the $8 fee for a blue check? The limits are a lot lower if they didn’t…
sigstoat 3y ago
i’m sure it seems like “everyone” is on twitter when you’re permanently online, but even the peak MAU figures don’t look anything like “everyone” in the US let alone the rest of the world. any government messaging plan that revolves around twitter was irresponsible. same with whatever other single social media platform you want to name.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  It’s almost as if the government messaging plan did not use a single social media platform, as the article very clearly describes. > DriveBC has a dedicated website, but many access its automated messages through its Twitter account, a platform accessed by more than a quarter of Canadians in 2023, according to the company’s advertising data.
TrickardRixx 3y ago
Every phone in my office screeches a couple times a month with Amber Alerts for missing children several hours away from my location. We already have a channel for mass broadcasting emergency alerts to every mobile device. Why was Twitter ever the platform of choice for this?
- dagmx 3y ago
  Amber alerts are about immediacy of action. If every single event was a similar alert, there would be alert fatigue and it would reduce the efficacy of the alerts. BC also annoyingly only has one level of alert so you can’t currently suggest multiple level handling. Most devices only handle two alert levels anyway. There are also multiple levels of information. Many of the tweets posted aren’t things that need immediate action. It’s just a notice for people to be aware of. And then that begs the question of why Twitter? Well because that’s what people are (or were before Musk) paying attention to. You post messages where the people are
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > alerts to every mobile device Believe it or not there are loads of folks who think this is government overreach. But they are absolutely fine with corporations harvesting their every move.
imchillyb 3y ago
Declare: eminent domain, public safety, national security, and for the children and seize the servers. Twitter is a monopoly and should be treated as such. Same with Facebook, reddit, et al. Sure there would be push back, but after making those companies public trusts with government regulatory oversight who cares anymore? Oh, yeah, the tyrannical CEOs and boards of directors. They’ll care. But they’d also probably be facing indictments for undisclosed criminal activities, so…
padseeker 3y ago
Where are all those fanboys who whenever Elon would make a bone headed move, they would correct you about how no Elon is a genius and here's why. I desperately want to hear what they have to say this time.
acyou 3y ago
Were 1500+ short form text messages per month really ever an effective means of communication for emergency purposes? If these messages are all related to road conditions (Drive BC), would an interactive map, a search engine, a table, or integration with Google Maps not have made more sense here? It's good that our governments are losing the ability to use this lazy, inefficient, terrible form of communication (thousands of short form messages on a private platform). Every government agency using privately owned social media as an exclusive channel for communication was/is acting irresponsibly.
- katbyte 3y ago
  Bc does have maps, both drive bc abs for wildfires https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee385abe2a41b https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee... The problem is people have it in their head to use and rely on Twitter so the agencies are doing their best to get information out to as many people as possible Now that Twitter has crippled this it’s likely time to just stop using it as no information there is better then out of date/missing critical information
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
So this is about the API limits --- not what most readers would assume, that someone was typing furiously away sending out updates and ran into an error. The API limit is crap yep. But there's also been a bunch of messing around with it lately that's broken things and sometimes it's working sometimes not etc. Anyways, not supporting Twitter on this but posting manually still viable for updates I suppose.
swader999 3y ago
Something to be said for this not being used properly by BC gov. If they went over their limit then it was not well thought out, who has time in an emergency to read all those tweets to find one that is relevant to their locality?
- acyou 3y ago
  I have to agree. I think it goes to show that a combination of bureaucracy and automation can be dangerous. Unfortunately, some person writing the tweets (or their bosses) might even think of the number of tweets, or more broadly the number of alerts, warnings and orders, etc, as some sort of perverted productivity metric.
mewse-hn 3y ago
I felt like I never "got" twitter and never became a heavy user, so I've been feeling pretty smug about its downfall. HOWEVER - governments started posting information to twitter because that's where the eyeballs were. It's not really that different from sending out information via the big 3 tv networks - those are private companies as well, but it was the most effective way to get info to as many people as quickly as possible. Imagine one of the big 3 tv broadcasters dropping the ball on dispersing wildfire information, they'd be abject with their apologies to the govt and the public. I guess where this comparison falls apart is we never saw an egomaniacal shitlord buy a big 3 tv broadcaster and run it into the ground.
- ghusto 3y ago
  > It's not really that different from sending out information via the big 3 tv networks Doesn't the government have special powers there that give them rights for special types of message broadcasts? I don't know, but I always presumed they did (at least in the UK). That wouldn't be a bad compromise here too. The big five should be treated the same way as TV channels (if my mentioned understanding is actually correct).
  - mewse-hn 3y ago
    Funny you mentioned the UK - I'm in Canada and our BBC and CBC channels have an even larger responsibility to inform the public than the American big three, but they receive govt funding. I don't think this is the sort of thing that needs legislative intervention, I think Twitter needs to get out of the way and let the govt communicate with its citizens when lives are at stake. Rate limiting their tweets during wildfire evacuations was a colossal fuck up. "Colossal fuck up" seems to be Twitter's current operating procedure, and will doom them as a platform.
dynamorando 3y ago
Why isn’t there funding for public social media? Doesn’t Germany and the Netherlands run their own Mastodon instances?
riffic 3y ago
push your elected officials to adopt policy requiring public sector agencies make use of ActivityPub oriented services, whether they're Mastodon, Pixelfed, or even just WordPress with the AP plugin installed. This has been a huge problem with Twitter, noted by many in the emergency communications sector going back at least 2 years or longer.
joshe 3y ago
Unclear from the article, but maybe they can just pay $8? An expensive enterprise account is mentioned, but no linkage as to whether they would be forced to use it.
ChumpGPT 3y ago
Does anyone listen to the radio for Emergency Broadcasts? This is probably the best way to get info out to a lot of people quickly, there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't use twitter or social media. Could also send out mass txt messages like an amber alert sort of service to all mobile signals in the zone.
yazzku 3y ago
Sounds like they learned proprietary infra doesn't pass for public infra the hard way.
loeber 3y ago
All kinds of public organizations (governments, fire departments, heads of state, etc.) have been using Twitter to broadcast news for the last fifteen years, as if it were a public utility. But it isn't. And many politicians have been complaining for years about social media not being regulated as such. With all the kvetching about insufficient regulation and social media being a public utility, you would think that one government somewhere would've built a public utility Twitter alternative for that purpose, right? But nobody has. A few days ago, I wrote in detail about this surprising dynamic: https://loeber.substack.com/p/10-why-is-there-no-government-built https://loeber.substack.com/p/10-why-is-there-no-government-...
pierat 3y ago
They could EASILY sign up for a Canadian Mastodon instance..... Or they could make their own Mastodon Govt instance. They don't control the man-child at the helm of Twitter. But they can definitely control their own servers. And I'm sure plenty would federate with their Masto instance, since it could easily be scoped to govt stuff. Control your own servers, control your own data. Control your own destiny.
- riffic 3y ago
  or they could write/buy software that interacts with the underlying ActivityPub protocol and not even use Mastodon itself. For example, there's a wordpress ActivityPub plugin that will interoperate with many existing sites on the Fediverse.
paganel 3y ago
Doesn’t Canada have a country- or state-wide emergency alert system that involves sending messages directly to people’s phones? (including “dumb” ones). Because that would make a lot more sense than relying on a private app, or on any app, for that matter.
mkoryak 3y ago
> Twitter did not respond to Glacier Media's questions. They probably responded... with a poop emoji.
dogman144 3y ago
Good. Take some tough medicine from this experience and then build public crisis management systems not owned by a product/profit-driven private corporation that’s loosely controlled by a completely separate country. The moment heads of state were ATO’d to shill crypto scams by a teenage in Florida iirc in 2019/20 should have been the final straw in relying on twitter for public interest. Next, get PTAs and local govts off Facebook pages.
interestica 3y ago
SMS.
imwillofficial 3y ago
Besides the cardinal rule of emergency management reporting, “go where the people are” It’s important to keep up to date with the capabilities and limitations of your lines of communications. Solar activity can effect radios, storms can effect satellite feeds, and not taking into account policy changes can bump you into rate limits. This was a failure of the social media team to calibrate during a feature change that came unexpectedly. This could be a chance to use this bad press on Twitter to pressure then into exempting public good type accounts.
ghusto 3y ago
I'm glad this is forcing recognition of something that should have been obvious; private platforms should not be relied on for official government communication (or in my opinion used at all by government, but that's a longer argument). In the Netherlands, you're _expected_ to have WhatsApp. So many places rely on it. There are even official WhatsApp neighbourhood-watch signs on streets. It's short sighted and frankly, stupid.
sidewndr46 3y ago
maybe, just maybe government should not depend on private for-profit companies for essential communication
dirtyid 3y ago
Bring back radios.

346 points by nosecreek 3y ago

You should NOT be relying on something like Twitter for an emergency announcement system. That is just asinine.

Welp, that's terrible. Key question: how would a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub service) have fared here? There are companies that offer alert broadcasting services (e.g., [0]). Have any of them started to support ActivityPub? Could they make 1:m focused platforms that implement a subset of the standard really well? Do we need to define a subset of ActivityPub that increases efficiency for this kind of mass communication? I have no answers, only questions [0] https://voyent-alert.com/us/communities/municipalities/ https://voyent-alert.com/us/communities/municipalities/

phoe-krk 3y ago
> Welp, that's terrible. Key question: how would a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub service) have fared here? For once, no hardcoded tweet/toot limit. The only limitation would be the network - the ability for toots to leave the home instance as they're pushed to other instances. Given the current size of mastodon.social (the largest Mastodon instance) and its ability to push toots out to other instances (including mine) despite the size of m.s, I don't think it would be an issue in the current circumstances.
mpalczewski 3y ago
They would have posted and much fewer people would have seen the announcements. You have to go where the users are.
lostlogin 3y ago
Wouldn’t geofenced SMS be a better solution than Twitter for this? Or maybe those Emergency Mobile Alerts? If something less obtrusive is wanted, a simple push notification or webpage?
- RustomMS 3y ago
  Maybe but I think it is more like how most people don't use SMS for messaging vs some kind of internet based app/ecosystem. SMS/telcos couldn't support what people needed, multimedia support, group chats etc. I think the use of Twitter and social media in general would be similar for these government groups. They just have better tools. I think the best approach is to still use Twitter but also use all Social Media like Facebook (especially), Insta (hard to do for text) but you could link to their Website with the same posts/info. In the end you have to try and inform the public where they are, just like would happen on TV or Radio in the past. Maybe it is actually a space for Google/Apple/Microsoft/Linux as OS makers to provide some functionality to do this kind of broadcasting over the internet in addition to working with Telcos for SMS/mobile based alerting.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > Maybe it is actually a space for Google/Apple/Microsoft/Linux as OS makers to provide some functionality to do this kind of broadcasting over the internet Isn’t this the emergency alert notification? Or are you imagining something for situations where it isn’t an emergency but the information needs to be out there? If so, I’d be thinking a dedicated app is what’s needed.
foxylad 3y ago
Mastodon.nz fared very well during recent heavy rain events in New Zealand. Absolutely no tech limitations, and more importantly no arbitrary management-imposed limits.

alenrozac 3y ago

People will blame Twitter, but imho, a public agency should not rely solely on scale provided to it by a single private platform. It looks like they recognize it too: > “We've been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications,” said Reynolds. “But it really doesn't work once things change.”

brookst 3y ago
Were they exclusively using Twitter, or offering it as one of many channels so people could choose how to receive info? The former is a terrible idea, the latter is great (until things change). I frequently drive a sometimes closed section of road with flashing “tune to AM 560 for road info” signs. It would be great if there were “follow DOT on [service]” options.
- JTon 3y ago
  Doubtful. Canada has emergency alert systems in place over AM and FM radio, over Broadcast TV, and over SMS/cellphone. Those are the systems I'm aware of, but there may be more.
  - katbyte 3y ago
    In bc there is drivebc which is the source of truth for road conditions (with webcams) There are also status pages for bcferries translink and wildfires Wildfires has a webpage https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map An app, and a map https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee385abe2a41b https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee...
- e-shrdlu 3y ago
  It looks like they had a website too, but most people went to twitter for updates
helen___keller 3y ago
Agreed, this was already a frustration of mine. There’s been a scroll limit on Twitter from forever ago, and the most frustration I’ve experienced with social media is realizing I had to sign up for twitter if I wanted to look at the public communications going back a few hours by my local police department (at the time there was a manhunt in my neighborhood and we were being advised to stay indoors. I was spooked.)

mcv 3y ago

> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency. I'm glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this. Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start.

BossingAround 3y ago
Can't they just send emergency text messages? Good ol' SMS. They should be able to use phone infrastructure for emergency notifications.
- BenisMaximus 3y ago
  What if the phone infrastructure goes down for any reason? Having the data backup is smart because many of these folks have satellite internet even when their phones don't work.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Why do they need social networks for that? Just set up an oldschool website and post stuff there.
- jarebear6expepj 3y ago
  Define social network. I agree, and would personally consider public websites, old and new school, to be social networks.
  - blitz_skull 3y ago
    Yeah, not me. That's a website. It's a pretty distinct technological entity, that has nothing to do with "social" networking which has been defined during the past 20 years as a single website with "social" sharing capabilities. Ideally a government-run emergency broadcast website would have literally 0 social features.

ndlan 3y ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 3y ago
The tool was fit for this purpose for years, and as a result widely used for said purpose. Twitter here is like a hammer that suddenly refuses to pound nails.
- acheron 3y ago
  Twitter has never been good for this purpose. Back when blue checks were unusual, you could tell who Twitter cared about: government accounts were “unverified”, but of course every 22 year old Gawker intern had one.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    ? Twitter was theoretically not good for this purpose, but in practice was actually quite good. Which is, of course, what matters here in reality. The status fixation on blue checks is so fucking absurd.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  It is like a hammer you purchased on finance at zero interest whose hardware store suddenly wants the hammer back now that rates have gone up, or you pay interest to carry on using said hammer.
b3lvedere 3y ago
Man uses tool and finds out it works awesome. Other man buys and modifies said tool. Man needs to search another tool.

neom 3y ago

Loads of people commenting under their tweet say the account was unverified at the time so the rate limit was lower, but when you click on verified badge on their profile it says they've been verified since July 2021... weird. https://twitter.com/DriveBC/status/1675600911782256640 https://twitter.com/DriveBC/status/1675600911782256640

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

zapkyeskrill 3y ago

[flagged]

uncertainrhymes 3y ago

Twitter is terrible ... except it is still the best real-time broadcast tool available to governments and those without IT staff and budgets. Most local groups around me just stopped trying, or reverted to Facebook. They used it because it was free and easy -- the idea they could build their own alternative and get people to follow it is just impossible for them. During some recent fires near me the official communication was confused and awful. One retired firefighter just decided to tweet status updates from listening to the operations radio and he became the most reliable source around. At least the mobile phone alerts worked for evacuations.

pera 3y ago

Government agencies should use RSS or ActivityPub for all their communications, it's unacceptable that they depend on a private company like Twitter for this sort of things. How did we get to this point?

exegete 3y ago
They send the info where the people are. People aren’t using RSS or ActivityPub at the same scale as Twitter.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  Do both obviously
- pera 3y ago
  People use RSS for their podcasts, and they would use it for important government communications too if that was the official channel.
lionkor 3y ago
I would imagine that the choice of platform is tied to how many people have access to it - twitter is common, so is facebook, and twitter used to be open enough that one could see tweets even if not registered. The real issue is not rapidly reacting to changes to the platform, such as immediately moving to a different platform, whatever it may be.
eropple 3y ago
Generally speaking, by trying to communicate with people in ways that they will read.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 3y ago
I think the problem isn't so much that the infra is privately owned, but that it is privately owned and almost completely unregulated. Emergency vehicles frequently drive across toll bridges in many countries, say, and this is basically fine. What does _not_ generally happen is that they're stopped and told "sorry, the weird new owner of the bridge fired all the maintenance people, so we only have one lane open, and we have to prioritise someone called Cat Turd 2 driving across it, so go away". (The next day, the bridge collapses). (Arguably something like this did kind of happen with the UK's rail system, with the end result that Railtrack (the private company which John Major had rather unwisely sold the network to and then failed to regulate properly) was effectively re-nationalised.)

AlchemistCamp 3y ago

Don’t rely on a company’s free tier for anything truly critical. Either self-host your own solution, built on open source dependencies, or pay a company on a plan with an SLA that meets your needs.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

111111IIIIIII 3y ago

[flagged]

cornercasechase 3y ago
It’s barely capitalism. A guy who made his money with government handouts and bribing the SEC so he can commit fraud used his ill gotten gains to purchase a profitable company. Then he burned that company to the ground and made it permanently unprofitable. It’s capitalism in its most distorted sense.
- hanniabu 3y ago
  You just described capitalism
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Profitable?
- zerodensity 3y ago
  I do find it unnerving that a single unelected person can have this kind of power in a democracy.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  That's just capitalism.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    "Barely capitalism" is what "capitalism" becomes without a baby sitter.
    - 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
      The babysitter is always capital itself, hence why it's called capitalism. Sometimes the babysitter gets distracted or gives in for a while, but it always comes back and it always has the final word.

api 3y ago

Was social media ever a reliable platform during emergencies?

ink_13 3y ago
Yes, almost impressively so. This should be a big embarrassment for Twitter.
brewdad 3y ago
Surprisingly so. It is particularly effective at reaching an audience who no longer consumes much “traditional” media like TV and radio. A multipronged approach is needed when trying to reach as many people as possible.

hermannj314 3y ago

Vendor Management is a critical component of an organization. Since the government was relying on Twitter to provide certain service levels and the government was paying for those negotiated services, this should be an easy win based on the contractual remedies that were pre-negotiated. I mean the BC government is hundreds of years old so they know all of this so it should be a pretty easy win for them. It isn't like this is a new thing.

acyou 3y ago
If you aren't paying, is there really a formal customer/vendor relationship in the way you describe? There is just as good of a case to be made that the BC government was the "vendor" here, by indirectly delivering users to Twitter for decades, for free, by using the private platform for exclusive, official communications. Or that that was the "payment". BC government would have agreed to TOS, like everyone else, which likely state Twitter can change service levels at an time.

stainablesteel 3y ago

radio stations are already used for this, this isn't a failing of twitter imo

apozem 3y ago

Yet another example of how these new Twitter API limits are self-defeating and poorly considered. A far-sighted Twitter owner would want as many government agencies and news alerts on the platform as possible. The cost giving them API access is dwarfed by the value of making Twitter the place for real-time information. That's the whole point of Twitter. These agencies provide value to Twitter, not vice versa. Asking them to pay means you don't understand that.

neom 3y ago
This isn't about the API. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limits https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...
- notRobot 3y ago
  > Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, however, Twitter has put new rules in place that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying. The move was carried out partly as a response to rising concerns artificial intelligence platforms would use the historical archives of social media platforms to train their large language models. From TFA. Seems like this is about the API?
  - neom 3y ago
    I think the author is conflating, the API limits are not temporary, but the new tweet limit imposed by the app are, and DriveBC specifically said "have exceeded the temporarily imposed post rate limit" - I emailed the author for clarification, but I'm fairly sure he's conflating. EDIT: I emailed the author and he said it's a mistake - he's updating the article.
    - notRobot 3y ago
      Very cool! :)
helen___keller 3y ago

skizm 3y ago

> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency. I draw the opposite conclusion here. I think governments should be using more platforms to blast their messages. Redundancy for mission critical messages is a good thing. They should be using both their own app / infra plus all other social medias that are available. Update your website, RSS feed, send whatsapp messages, send an instagram message, send a tweet, post to your facebook, etc. If someone doesn't want socials, there should be ways to opt-in to texts or phone calls. Ideally they can have one place to enter the message on their end, and a bunch of checkboxes to which socials / channels to post a message too. Behind the scenes it will apply appropriate transformations for specific platforms if necessary (turn words into an image for instagram, split posts if longer than the twitter limit, etc.).

softwaredoug 3y ago
I agree. Post to all the places. I am annoyed that my local police dept posts regularly to a facebook page, behind a login. But not to twitter.
bell-cot 3y ago
> I think governments should be using more platforms to blast their messages. Redundancy for mission critical messages is a good... I'd assume that gov't resources are limited. Especially during major emergencies, when little local municipal governments are usually the ones on the front lines during the most dangerous phases. Maintaining "all of the above" social media accounts during emergencies does not sound compatible with that realty.

t0bia_s 3y ago

I find quite irresponsible to use social network as source of emergency news in first place.

romusha 3y ago

People still use twitter?

cubefox 3y ago

1.500 tweets per month are 50 tweets per day, every day. Do people really follow when they get flooded like that?

reportgunner 3y ago
> Do people really follow when they get flooded like that? They probably don't know that anything else is possible.

fidotron 3y ago

One of the oddities of living in Canada is the authorities overuse the amber alert system for when a divorced couple have a fight and someone takes the kids off in a hurry with no problem, but if someone is pretending to be a cop while shooting people and your actual cops are shooting up barns with innocent people hiding in then you're lucky if they Tweet about it. In fact two people died while they were getting permission to Tweet about it, but at least they weren't cops: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/canada-nova-scotia-mass-shooting-tweet-public-inquiry https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/canada-nova-sc...

gwright 3y ago
I noticed something similar while visiting Texas last year. We have an Amber alert in my home state but it is triggered maybe 3 times/year. When I was in Texas I received the alert 3 or 4 times in a couple of days. The people I was visiting seemed to think that was typical. It seemed to me that the alerts weren't very localized.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  Yes, they can be annoying, but Texas has a pretty big population, and kidnappers can travel pretty quickly. Law enforcement can't see everything, even if they have a "BOLO" (be on the lookout), but with millions of people on the roads, someone might spot the kidnapper's vehicle.) Issuing Amber Alerts sooner rather than later (or not at all) is optimal and the Amber Alert system in Texas has definitely resulted in some child rescues before those kids disappeared forever, especially if they have plate numbers or descriptions.
neom 3y ago
Keep in mind there are types of alerts that can be triggered, emergency alerts and public broadcast alerts, amber alerts etc. You can toggle on and off what you want in the setting of the phone. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743 https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-turn-off-amber-alerts-android-800435/ https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-turn-off-amber-alert...

voxadam 3y ago

Amazing, this is almost play-for-play the same screw up Verizon committed when they severely throttled the data usage of firefighters in California during the 2018 wildfires.[0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

mhandley 3y ago

Governments by law generally have the power to interrupt traditional media to put out emergency broadcasts. They could just as easily mandate that for any social media company/channel over a certain size to do business in the country, it must carry any emergency information the government puts out for free. It's important the information goes where the population is paying attention. If that requires laws to make happen, governments are pretty good at passing laws, though they're usually far too slow to make the right laws.

shkkmo 3y ago

The article leads off with "Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency." But later down the article admits: > Twitter has put new rules in place that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying So if the B.C. government had bothered paying for the service rather than relying on a free account to disemminate mission critical info, there would have been no issue. So this is really just yet another biased Twitter hit piece rather than actual journalism.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
What crap: Musk also prevented people from viewing tweets during the same period. Couldn't see Tweets if you didn't have an account (you still can't browse, only see a specific linked tweet), and even if you did you were limited to 600 a day. It's not a public service. It should never have been used that way. People need to stop posting twitter feeds as generally accessible things, and treat Twitter like a private site that it is. Anyways, thank you Musk for teaching the public that they were using it wrong. Now they can demand their governments actually create proper services for the public instead of relying on his stuff. Now if kids schools etc could stop using Facebook groups too? Wouldn't that be nice?

blywi 3y ago

The same thing happened a week ago in Hamburg/Germany when the fire department wanted to inform the local population about necessary evacuations for removal of World War II unexploded ordnance that were found during construction work. They had hit their Twitter limit and were unable to post the notice. In German: https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-hamburg-wird-waehrend-bombenentschaerfung-eingeschraenkt-CAA6NRUEHZA4DDP7DSCHNUL2FM.html https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-ha...

ibejoeb 3y ago

I have questions: 1. Does Twitter even know about this? 2. Did the transportation minister bring this to Twitter? I mean, if it's such a big deal, is it worth a ring, email, or DM? 3. Did Twitter refuse to uncap it? I don't know if the reporting is sloppy, or if there is an agenda, or whatever, but there are acknowledgements by the government that they were lazily relying on Twitter without any kind of formal arrangement. If I'm handling comms for the ministry, I would go to twitter with a public weal request that it designates critical information accounts with no practical rate limits and that are visible to all without sign-in. They have the capability. Someone needs to initiate it.

usednet 3y ago
> Lazily relying on Twitter I don't think that every government ministry or important figure should be expected to have to proactively reach out to Twitter and make a "formal arrangement" to avoid being rate limited on one of the world's primary sources of real-time information. This is simply a bad standard to set. Nevermind that, the rate limits were implemented a week ago so calling it lazy to not have a "formal arrangement" in place in less than a week is silly, especially considering that Twitter support's response times right now are atrocious.
- dmonitor 3y ago
  Counterpoint, if a government is relying on a novelty microblog website for apparently important infrastructure, the website should probably be informed of this.
  - usednet 3y ago
    1. Twitter has existed since 2006, I'm sure they are very well aware of governments utilizing their platform since then. 2. How do you expect governments to provide information? Should they: a. Distribute information via the most widely consumed forms of media b. Create individual platforms so that people have to check a unique website to stay upddated on each government ministry 3. Twitter may be a "novelty microblog website" in a global sense, but in North America calling it that is absurd.

logshipper 3y ago

I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how its the government's fault for relying on a private service for public communications. The sentiment, while understandable (and not entirely unfair), assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$. A Twitter account (well, before the Musk takeover anyway) offered: a) The ability to disseminate information to essentially anyone with a mobile device and an internet connection. b) Low setup costs, maintenance overhead, and technical expertise needed. As a taxpayer, I would like my government to be cost-effective in resource allocation - Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way to maintain a 1-->many communications infrastructure. That said, I fully agree that they should explore alternatives in light of Musk's antics. It is important to also remember that government can be slow when it comes to embracing tech. ActivityPub is only 5 years old, and that's a short-time by govt standards, RSS is effectively (and quite sadly) dead for the everyday folk. This may or may not surprise the readership here, but Ontario's healthcare system still uses faxes to transmit patient records: https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate-fax-machines-within-next-five-years-to-promote-patient#:~:text=To%20Health%20Care-,Ontario%20Government%20To%20Eliminate%20Fax%20Machines%20Within%20The%20Next%20Five,And%20Access%20To%20Health%20Care&text=On%20February%202%2C%202023%2C%20Ontario%27s,Convenient%20Care%20(the%20Plan) https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate....

mxuribe 3y ago
It is the gov's fault for relying on a service...that lacked a formal legal agreement that favors the gov, and even better that favors the citizens who pay taxes to said gov. But, i am not going to fault the gov folks too much, because hey they're human, and also because i'm pretty sure that the gov's intent (in deciding to use mechanisms like twitter) were not evil, quite the contrary no doubt. I fault such governments not because they're thinking evil, but rather poor decision-making. Also, you make a valid point that gov entities often lack enough tech personnel...However, i feel gov entities should at least have some small numbers of tech personnel who - not only install hardware, software - but advise governments on what technologies could fit the very specific needs of the citizens. Corporations for years/decades have technology advisors on staff; basically IT/tech/digital folks who don't go anywhere near software/hardware, and instead advise corporate entities on leveraging the most appropriate tech solutions for whatever scenarios come up for said corpporations. What any gov should always ask themselves in cases of deciding for platforms for emergency use: what mechanisms do we need in place that will scale to provide the service (emergency comms and/or broadcast) that our citizens need, etc.. To your point about having gov. be cost-effective, i fully agree with you! While i happily (yes, happily!) pay my taxes when gov uses them to good use (because it helps everyone in the long-term even if they dont realize it), i dislike poor decision-making by govs when they waste my tax dollars. So, i think the issue is not so much that govs can not afford to make long-term proper decisions of choosing scalable, appropriate tech platforms...but rather, that many govs simply make poor choices, or don't know how to make a choice, and then rely on ther wrong people to help make bad choices. As the point about faxes...the U.S. also relies on fax as the approved "private" communcation system within healthcare...Not because gov doesn't move fast enough nor because someone made a bad tech decisioin...but we use faxes in american healthcare because someone made a bad tech decision AND THEN proceeded to explicityl cement that decision into law! Overall, i blame gov, but not too roughly...but i also blame our gov/political leaders for not thinking properly long-term, and often relying too much on private entities...entities who do not always have the same incentives alignbed with citizens. Ok, ok, i'm off my soap box now. Thanks for your patience! :-)

dudeinjapan 3y ago

Did they pay the $8 fee for a blue check? The limits are a lot lower if they didn’t…

sigstoat 3y ago

i’m sure it seems like “everyone” is on twitter when you’re permanently online, but even the peak MAU figures don’t look anything like “everyone” in the US let alone the rest of the world. any government messaging plan that revolves around twitter was irresponsible. same with whatever other single social media platform you want to name.

mynameisvlad 3y ago
It’s almost as if the government messaging plan did not use a single social media platform, as the article very clearly describes. > DriveBC has a dedicated website, but many access its automated messages through its Twitter account, a platform accessed by more than a quarter of Canadians in 2023, according to the company’s advertising data.

TrickardRixx 3y ago

Every phone in my office screeches a couple times a month with Amber Alerts for missing children several hours away from my location. We already have a channel for mass broadcasting emergency alerts to every mobile device. Why was Twitter ever the platform of choice for this?

dagmx 3y ago
Amber alerts are about immediacy of action. If every single event was a similar alert, there would be alert fatigue and it would reduce the efficacy of the alerts. BC also annoyingly only has one level of alert so you can’t currently suggest multiple level handling. Most devices only handle two alert levels anyway. There are also multiple levels of information. Many of the tweets posted aren’t things that need immediate action. It’s just a notice for people to be aware of. And then that begs the question of why Twitter? Well because that’s what people are (or were before Musk) paying attention to. You post messages where the people are
gumballindie 3y ago
> alerts to every mobile device Believe it or not there are loads of folks who think this is government overreach. But they are absolutely fine with corporations harvesting their every move.

imchillyb 3y ago

Declare: eminent domain, public safety, national security, and for the children and seize the servers. Twitter is a monopoly and should be treated as such. Same with Facebook, reddit, et al. Sure there would be push back, but after making those companies public trusts with government regulatory oversight who cares anymore? Oh, yeah, the tyrannical CEOs and boards of directors. They’ll care. But they’d also probably be facing indictments for undisclosed criminal activities, so…

padseeker 3y ago

Where are all those fanboys who whenever Elon would make a bone headed move, they would correct you about how no Elon is a genius and here's why. I desperately want to hear what they have to say this time.

acyou 3y ago

Were 1500+ short form text messages per month really ever an effective means of communication for emergency purposes? If these messages are all related to road conditions (Drive BC), would an interactive map, a search engine, a table, or integration with Google Maps not have made more sense here? It's good that our governments are losing the ability to use this lazy, inefficient, terrible form of communication (thousands of short form messages on a private platform). Every government agency using privately owned social media as an exclusive channel for communication was/is acting irresponsibly.

katbyte 3y ago
Bc does have maps, both drive bc abs for wildfires https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee385abe2a41b https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee... The problem is people have it in their head to use and rely on Twitter so the agencies are doing their best to get information out to as many people as possible Now that Twitter has crippled this it’s likely time to just stop using it as no information there is better then out of date/missing critical information

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

So this is about the API limits --- not what most readers would assume, that someone was typing furiously away sending out updates and ran into an error. The API limit is crap yep. But there's also been a bunch of messing around with it lately that's broken things and sometimes it's working sometimes not etc. Anyways, not supporting Twitter on this but posting manually still viable for updates I suppose.

swader999 3y ago

Something to be said for this not being used properly by BC gov. If they went over their limit then it was not well thought out, who has time in an emergency to read all those tweets to find one that is relevant to their locality?

acyou 3y ago
I have to agree. I think it goes to show that a combination of bureaucracy and automation can be dangerous. Unfortunately, some person writing the tweets (or their bosses) might even think of the number of tweets, or more broadly the number of alerts, warnings and orders, etc, as some sort of perverted productivity metric.

mewse-hn 3y ago

I felt like I never "got" twitter and never became a heavy user, so I've been feeling pretty smug about its downfall. HOWEVER - governments started posting information to twitter because that's where the eyeballs were. It's not really that different from sending out information via the big 3 tv networks - those are private companies as well, but it was the most effective way to get info to as many people as quickly as possible. Imagine one of the big 3 tv broadcasters dropping the ball on dispersing wildfire information, they'd be abject with their apologies to the govt and the public. I guess where this comparison falls apart is we never saw an egomaniacal shitlord buy a big 3 tv broadcaster and run it into the ground.

ghusto 3y ago
> It's not really that different from sending out information via the big 3 tv networks Doesn't the government have special powers there that give them rights for special types of message broadcasts? I don't know, but I always presumed they did (at least in the UK). That wouldn't be a bad compromise here too. The big five should be treated the same way as TV channels (if my mentioned understanding is actually correct).
- mewse-hn 3y ago
  Funny you mentioned the UK - I'm in Canada and our BBC and CBC channels have an even larger responsibility to inform the public than the American big three, but they receive govt funding. I don't think this is the sort of thing that needs legislative intervention, I think Twitter needs to get out of the way and let the govt communicate with its citizens when lives are at stake. Rate limiting their tweets during wildfire evacuations was a colossal fuck up. "Colossal fuck up" seems to be Twitter's current operating procedure, and will doom them as a platform.

dynamorando 3y ago

Why isn’t there funding for public social media? Doesn’t Germany and the Netherlands run their own Mastodon instances?

riffic 3y ago

push your elected officials to adopt policy requiring public sector agencies make use of ActivityPub oriented services, whether they're Mastodon, Pixelfed, or even just WordPress with the AP plugin installed. This has been a huge problem with Twitter, noted by many in the emergency communications sector going back at least 2 years or longer.

joshe 3y ago

Unclear from the article, but maybe they can just pay $8? An expensive enterprise account is mentioned, but no linkage as to whether they would be forced to use it.

ChumpGPT 3y ago

Does anyone listen to the radio for Emergency Broadcasts? This is probably the best way to get info out to a lot of people quickly, there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't use twitter or social media. Could also send out mass txt messages like an amber alert sort of service to all mobile signals in the zone.

yazzku 3y ago

Sounds like they learned proprietary infra doesn't pass for public infra the hard way.

loeber 3y ago

All kinds of public organizations (governments, fire departments, heads of state, etc.) have been using Twitter to broadcast news for the last fifteen years, as if it were a public utility. But it isn't. And many politicians have been complaining for years about social media not being regulated as such. With all the kvetching about insufficient regulation and social media being a public utility, you would think that one government somewhere would've built a public utility Twitter alternative for that purpose, right? But nobody has. A few days ago, I wrote in detail about this surprising dynamic: https://loeber.substack.com/p/10-why-is-there-no-government-built https://loeber.substack.com/p/10-why-is-there-no-government-...

pierat 3y ago

They could EASILY sign up for a Canadian Mastodon instance..... Or they could make their own Mastodon Govt instance. They don't control the man-child at the helm of Twitter. But they can definitely control their own servers. And I'm sure plenty would federate with their Masto instance, since it could easily be scoped to govt stuff. Control your own servers, control your own data. Control your own destiny.

riffic 3y ago
or they could write/buy software that interacts with the underlying ActivityPub protocol and not even use Mastodon itself. For example, there's a wordpress ActivityPub plugin that will interoperate with many existing sites on the Fediverse.

paganel 3y ago

Doesn’t Canada have a country- or state-wide emergency alert system that involves sending messages directly to people’s phones? (including “dumb” ones). Because that would make a lot more sense than relying on a private app, or on any app, for that matter.

mkoryak 3y ago

> Twitter did not respond to Glacier Media's questions. They probably responded... with a poop emoji.

dogman144 3y ago

Good. Take some tough medicine from this experience and then build public crisis management systems not owned by a product/profit-driven private corporation that’s loosely controlled by a completely separate country. The moment heads of state were ATO’d to shill crypto scams by a teenage in Florida iirc in 2019/20 should have been the final straw in relying on twitter for public interest. Next, get PTAs and local govts off Facebook pages.

interestica 3y ago

SMS.

imwillofficial 3y ago

Besides the cardinal rule of emergency management reporting, “go where the people are” It’s important to keep up to date with the capabilities and limitations of your lines of communications. Solar activity can effect radios, storms can effect satellite feeds, and not taking into account policy changes can bump you into rate limits. This was a failure of the social media team to calibrate during a feature change that came unexpectedly. This could be a chance to use this bad press on Twitter to pressure then into exempting public good type accounts.

ghusto 3y ago

I'm glad this is forcing recognition of something that should have been obvious; private platforms should not be relied on for official government communication (or in my opinion used at all by government, but that's a longer argument). In the Netherlands, you're _expected_ to have WhatsApp. So many places rely on it. There are even official WhatsApp neighbourhood-watch signs on streets. It's short sighted and frankly, stupid.

sidewndr46 3y ago

maybe, just maybe government should not depend on private for-profit companies for essential communication

dirtyid 3y ago

Bring back radios.