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> 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 corr

• 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.
      • sethhochberg 3y ago
        https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-01082 https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-01082 > Notify NYC messages are available through many formats, including email, text messages, telephone, a mobile application, the Notify NYC website, RSS, Twitter, and American Sign Language videos. Social can certainly be part of the mix. But its still silly to make it an exclusive channel.
      • jarebear6expepj 3y ago
        Not trying to be a pedant, but the WWW is a network, and being public implies a social use of the entity. I guess I am curious how exactly you would differentiate the two? Does it need a like and subscribe button? Public discourse?
        • blitz_skull 3y ago
          Yeah I don’t label something as “social” just because it’s “public”. I guess I’m saying we don’t need to like and comment on emergency updates. You can already share by an innovative technology called “URLs” ;)
  • eropple 3y ago
    Who's going to think of going to a website when under stress when they already have channels they go to and expect to be populated? Convincing people to return to websites for this kind of thing is boiling the ocean.
    • damnesian 3y ago
      Correct. But I think an app on iOS and Android could certainly do it.
      • eropple 3y ago
        So we should exclude Blackberry users? Like, tongue in cheek, but until the mad weirdo took over, Twitter was no less effective and open-access readable than an app, while requiring zero engineering effort from organizations that don't have engineering capability.
    • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      What's wrong with a website? If something massive is happening, do you open twitter to look at selfbrags, burger pics, etc., or do you open your local/national newssite (cnn.com, fox.com whatever) to see what happened? Want to see the weather? Will you open a weather site or wait for someone to put the report on twitter? Think you felt an earthquake... twitter? Or national eaqrthquake monitoring site? See a bunch of firefighters... twitter or emergency site?
      • eropple 3y ago
        "What's wrong with a website" is that it is not part of a relevance-curated, pushed feed that people are already using. If you look at pre-idiot-king Twitter, when there's an earthquake it fills up with comments about it, and very rapidly. Geological advisories get retweeted, again very rapidly. It turns out that yeah, this kinda actually works! I am not, I stress, saying that I like that this is the reality of things, but it speaks for itself.
  • duxup 3y ago
    > Why do they need social networks for that? That’s where people are. The number of people hanging out on some government website is probably low. The person tasked with warning is probably concerned with getting the word out to as many people as possible and less so how we would like things to be (not have to use twitter). If this was only announced via some obscure website we would be wondering why they didn't just tweet it out / why the government would expect people to just find some random website and refresh it all day.
    • earleybird 3y ago
      You're quite right, most people don't camp out on the DriveBC map or events pages. They do however park themselves on the webcam pages (which update as frequently as every two minutes). The webcam component of DriveBC is 10:1 in the request stats. The majority of bandwidth is consumed on the webcam pages. Have a look around, try out Replay-the-Day.
  • HyprMusic 3y ago
    They did. From the article: "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." The issue is no-one is going to know about that website whereas a tweet it likely to get retweeted by other residents.
  • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    A lot of people will go to Twitter (et al) first, because it's easier to find things happening in your region than figuring out which website has information on it. I mean take power outages. I have to figure out the website every time there's an outage then wait for them to actually update it, whereas Twitter already had pictures of the substation that was on fire.
  • renegade-otter 3y ago
    And then what, have everyone sit there all day and hit "refresh"?
  • badwolf 3y ago
    That's where the people are. A message can get spread much wider, and quicker due to retweets/re-shares.
• b3lvedere 3y ago
  When the Dutch government is going to take the problems with the C2000 system seriously remains to be seen though.. :)
• slashdev 3y ago
  > What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn't go out. Maybe that changes one day, maybe it doesn't. But that's the reality today.
  • reaperducer 3y ago
    An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn't go out. Except that emergency broadcasts (at least where I live) interrupt all television signals, all radio stations, all cable TV channels, all cell phones (unless you've intentionally disabled them), and one place I lived they even appeared on satellite TV channels. They even go out on satellite radio in North America. Then, if things get really bad, klaxons blare. Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense.
    • shkkmo 3y ago
      > Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense. The comment you are responding to is not doing that. The point was that there is little value is using a niche social media platform for emergency broadcasts because so few people use it. Sure, once you have the bigger platforms covered, there's no harm in adding smaller ones, but people calling to ditch twitter and use mastodon or some other service are being silly.
      • jakelazaroff 3y ago
        Why ditch one? Just post to both.
        • alexandre_m 3y ago
          Exactly. You should publish to multiple platforms if the message is deemed important. Nothing wrong with duplicating messages across private and public infrastructure websites.
    • 3y ago
• eropple 3y ago
  This is wishful thinking, though. The people that governments want to reach are not on Mastodon. Moreover, they're not going to be for a lot of good reasons. To inform the general populace, you go where they are.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
    • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      For sure; there's plenty of software out there that can manage multi-channel communication like that.
  • zuminator 3y ago
    So TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook?
    • eropple 3y ago
      Unfortunately: yeah, probably.
• TheLML 3y ago
  Or just dedicated apps. I have two different apps for warnings issued by German authorities. I can select regions that I want to be informed about and I'll get notifications on my phone for a few things. For example if there's a fire and they advise to keep windows closed, extreme weather warnings, and they also used to send out updates about changes to covid related restrictions.
  • inpdx 3y ago
    But then there are multiple apps. What if we put those apps into one, using the web to make it broadly accessible and searchable. It was called Twitter. Federation should solve this.
    • shkkmo 3y ago
      Then we're conflating low valur alerts with high value ones and the value of the signal is lost. Until twitter makes an actual emergency alert system, Twitter is not better than a dedicated alert app.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      In some bubbles yes. During the aussie bushfire I checked the government app, and using Twitter didn’t cross my mind. If anything Reddit has been much better for local information, but usually for the Monday quarterback stuff rather than timely info.
    • irrational 3y ago
      If people have and use Twitter. I never have, so I would never receive the messages.
    • dgellow 3y ago
      Twitter isn’t used by that many people in the US. 2022 numbers seem to show >20% of the country population is active on the platform. Even LinkedIn(!) broadcast would reach more people. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/05/10-facts-about-americans-and-twitter/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/05/10-facts-...
  • 3y ago
• damnesian 3y ago
  >Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. This. Love him or hate him, it doesn't matter- surely everyone can now agree Musk's personal, totally idiosyncratic treatment of the platform has rendered it completely useless for anything beyond pure vanity. A public-owned twitter-type platform is the answer, imho. We have publicly funded tv and radio- I think they have done a great job for what they are- what kid hasn't been improved by exposure to Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street?- but we live online now. It's time for a publicly-owned messaging system, whether that be federated or otherwise.
  • tedivm 3y ago
    I publicly owned twitter platform is complicated and presents a lot of problems. I think the federated model has a lot of appeal here, as it allows governments to broadcast alerts out without requiring them to take on a large platform (and moderation responsibilities, which are really complicated for a government).
    • zerodensity 3y ago
      What problems do you see with a publicly owned twitter variant?
      • my123 3y ago
        In an international world, which govt should operate it becomes a complicated matter.
        • ebiester 3y ago
          Each government should own one. It doesn't have to be federated to be useful.
      • Chabsff 3y ago
        A large social platform simply cannot survive without constant moderation that goes beyond strict application of the law. You need some form of community standards in place. A government agency governing what is acceptable speech is a bad idea.
• DebtDeflation 3y ago
  Maybe extend the Emergency Alert System law to Twitter. Anyone in the zone with the Twitter app installed gets that screeching alert tone followed by the color bars in the app and then the message. I'm only half joking.
  • _jal 3y ago
    For the half that's not, No. First, I don't think Twitter has the competence to do this - they're barely functional now. For instance, they threw away their infra for identity validation, so how will they figure out who needs access to the klaxon button? Second, Twitter is shedding users like a husky in the desert. As someone above said, if nobody see it, who cares? Third, there is already an emergency alert notification system for cell phones. Building another one just provides conflicting signals in an emergency. Twitter is dude's blog now. Pretending it is good for anything other than servicing his ego will result in frustration and waste.
    • ronsor 3y ago
      > how will they figure out who needs access to the klaxon button? Exclusive for Twitter Blue++ subscribers, only $189/month
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Not just protocols, but networks too; for emergencies there's still reserved FM / AM radio frequencies and the like, but in case of war or calamity, the first utility to go (and it's not classified as a utility yet!) will be the internet. No internet, no Mastodon or Twitter or anything anyway. And it'll be the last to be restored in terms of priority, after water, electricity and gas.
• dmix 3y ago
  Or everyone can just wait until these temporary limits are removed or have consumer pressure them to do it faster.
  • inpdx 3y ago
    I'm sure the fires will wait.
    • dmix 3y ago
      There's more than one way to publish information in the meantime (see: their own websites, Facebook, instagram, etc, working with the media). How did they do it before Twitter? I highly doubt these caps will be around for long to the point we have to re-think social media and pretend Mastodon will ever be a thing.
    • thepasswordis 3y ago
      >Oh my goodness the people are dependant on this essential service to find out information about some ongoing wildfires and it isn't working!! Is there anything we could do? >Well you could pay you $8 hosting bill? >Anything, anything at all we could do? >Pay the hosting bill. It's $8 >My god man, why is Elon Musk doing this to us?!? Is there any way to get this to stop? >Well we could pay the bill, which is $8. >We are completely helpless in this situation. Let's complain about it on twitter!
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • mynameisvlad 3y ago
        $8 for individuals. The BC Government is not an individual. I’m sure snarkily repeating the same thing will change that fact, though, so keep it up!
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        @DriveBC is already a verified government account, what are you talking about $8 for? Also, the “temporary” tweet limits are supposedly an anti-scraping, not anti-people-not-paying-for-Blue, measure.
• renegade-otter 3y ago
  Totally agree. While it was nice to piggyback on a private company app for a while, the concept has been proven. Mission-critical messages require mission-critical infrastructure. Ukraine, for example, is not using Twitter for this - they use their own emergency app for events that include Russian air attacks, shellings, chemical and radiation hazards. You can't leave the lives of your citizens in the hands of a mercurial, over-medicated wildcard.
  • Vibgyor5 3y ago
    They use Telegram - highly popular in Ukraine, Russia for messaging as well as news consumption.
• thepasswordis 3y ago
  It is insane to me that people will go to these lengths to avoid spending $8. >B.C. government refuses to spend $8 to keep their emergency services announcement host account active amid wildfire evacuation announcements.
  • izzydata 3y ago
    On principle I don't think they should. Twitter intentionally degraded an existing service. I don't think they should even spend a single dollar as they have proven themselves unreliable with changing things on a whim. It's not really about the money. It's about having control over the system that is used for critical services.
    • thepasswordis 3y ago
      What if they didn't pay their hosting bill?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • a_cool_username 3y ago
    The article discusses that this is actually in the tens of thousands of dollars: >Twitter’s API service limits tweets for non-paying users to 1,500 a month — not enough for many emergency accounts. And while a small fee for the platform's 'Blue Check' service will increase that ceiling for individual users, the cost of an enterprise account has reportedly climbed into the tens of thousands of dollars.
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    As a BC resident: I am totally fine with that. Twitter never should have become the government announcement site it did. I don't want critical announcements to be made through a private foreign company with extreme political leanings and financial ties to the Saudi government that requires an account to view. And I certainly don't want my tax money being spent in that way. I shouldn't have to have a twitter account, or interact with any site with "terms and conditions" in order to view critical safety information. Put it on a website that is available to all, and if someone wants to create a bot that posts it to private platforms that's a better way to solve the problem.
• KennyBlanken 3y ago
  > The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start. Something you won't find in the main article or the Reuters coverage. In fact, searching news.google.com for "dutch government mastodon" doesn't turn up a single mainstream media outlet covering it save for this one Reuters article about Germany: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-twitter-suspensions-we-have-problem-twitter-2022-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-twitter-suspens...
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  When was the start of twitter or social media as a reliable medium during an emergency. Radio/TV/News media/Phone calls I thought would be best.
• jojobas 3y ago
  > their own social media servers An RSS feed would suffice. Having essential information shared by means of open standards would prevent such standards from being replaced by proprietary bullshit, which would be common good.
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Experts? Where were these so called expects X months ago preaching that these for-profit platforms are not public utilities. Just because they're ubiquitous doesn't mean anything more than everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. Don't confuse convenience with dependability and proper infrastructure. It's silly - and distracting - to blame these platforms for what is ultimately local, state, and federal governments shooting themselves in the foot and putting the people they take a oath to serve at risk.
• tivert 3y ago
  > 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. It's not that simple. Emergency communications need to go where the people are, full stop. So even if some government sets up its own Mastodon instance, it still needs to put most of its effort getting its messages out on proprietary infrastructure. The Mastodon instance didn't actually solve the problem.
• weard_beard 3y ago
  Why not create a government "adwords" style JS include (open sourced) that is required for sites over a certain number of users, but optional for smaller sites. A banner that can display government warnings or messages in an emergency. It could even use basic geolocation to only display to relevant users.
• NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  > Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. Let me introduce you to this little thing formerly called the EBS (Emergency Broadcast System)... Perhaps that's different because the FCC regulates broadcast stations? Perhaps it's not.
• AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  Don’t rely on the free tier, at least. If you can’t self-host, then it’s highly advisable to actually pay for a service you deem critical.
• jrockway 3y ago
  > Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. You have to go where the people are. It's unlikely that anyone will remember to install the MyCity app or whatever, and then you're just sending your messages to /dev/null. You don't get an error when you send out the alert, but the same number of people receive it as the over-rate-limit Twitter account. 0. I am surprised that the B.C. government can't just text message people based on location. Governments in the US definitely can. I recall some year in NYC where everyone got mandatory stream of consciousness "alerts" from the government. ("We're looking for some criminal in New Jersey! It's a dude guy!" OK, I'll get right on that? "We're expecting ONE INCH of snow. Everybody panic and don't even think about going outside!" OK I guess? We all that weak from climate change already?) I also have to say I wouldn't object to just putting my email address on my tax return and getting a weekly newsletter from the city that way.
  • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    > I am surprised that the B.C. government can't just text message people based on location. Governments in the US definitely can. Same here in Poland. I frequently receive messages about extreme weather, counter terrorism exercises, the balloon thing recently.
  • riffic 3y ago
    Yes, you have to go where the people are but also remember that the audience is capable of using multiple channels and the audience has made shifts to novel media many times before (printed news > radio > broadcast television > cable > internet, et cetera)
  • carapace 3y ago
    > You have to go where the people are. There are a lot of people saying that in this thread, but I think "the people" have a responsibility here too, no?
• andrewstuart2 3y ago
  Honestly I'm torn here. Twitter is a good example for your specific scenario here, but the US government, at least, is absolutely not trustworthy for building and running infrastructure. My wife is in grad school and we're taking on loans, part of which involves FAFSA. I spent a mildly infuriating hour or two the other day trying to figure out our next steps, in large part because every single HTTP request to studentaid.gov was taking a minimum of 8 seconds. Meaning literal 2-minute page load times, which makes an already confusing situation about 10x more frustrating. And then when things did load, a significant portion of the time, there were significant bugs like important "notifications" appearing and disappearing, or not being clickable and just a "figure it out yourself" type deal. The way the system works, getting multiple contractors, etc, which I've been a part of as a contractor before, is just destined for failure. Maybe it works for NASA rockets and defense equipment, historically, but the process fails us when it comes to building tech in a significant number of cases. I'm not sure what the right answer is. Maybe just open source standards, software, and protocols. At least in those cases, you stand a chance of someone who knows what they're doing helping out when something goes wrong.
• britzkopf 3y ago
  So they will hire a team of government employees to set up a mastadon server over the course of a year, then add some staff to maintain it and some more for public outreach to make everyone aware this is their new channel, at what cost? Versus paying a nominal fee for Twitter? Nice idea to have "public infrastructure" but does it make sense in this case?
• briffle 3y ago
  This can also be a disaster, as most municipalities don't have the infrastructure and redunancies to handle the huge spikes in traffic that emegencies can require. My city 2 years ago sent an emergency alert text to everyone in the area that our water was tested as not safe to drink, and a link to their website for more info. The site was hosted on their server, in their server room in their main city hall. (Capital city, >250k residents). The web site was completely unaccessable for days.... Not even something like cloudflare, or any kind of CDN for caching..
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    how about this - one of the most deadly fires in California history was the one that destroyed the poetically-named town of Paradise. There is basically one road out of a small town surrounded by rugged hills. There have been fires there before. SO the County Sheriff teamed up with a private company to REQUIRE payment from evey citizen for an early warning system. That early warning system DID NOT WORK on the day of the deadly fire! It is well-documented.
• woleium 3y ago
  This! A BBC mastodon instance would be a great way to go (for the UK)
• charles_f 3y ago
  Since we're talking about BC, they released their wildfire app[1] a few years ago and made it so you can't use the website from mobile anymore. The rationale being that this app can notify you of evacuations in progress Unsurprisingly it's much worse than the website itself and not working well (look at the comments). I think you have a point, but Twitter was very reliable until it was bought out, and served as a centralized notification channel where you could have all your sources, official and informal. I don't want to have to replace it by 6 different apps for weather alerts, drivebc alerts, wildfire alerts and so on; especially if they are worse than Twitter. I also prefer my government to spend money on the actual service (predicting weather, tracking and fighting fires, tracking traffic) than on duplicating the work of creating a delivery channel. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.bc.gov.WildfireInformation https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.bc.gov.Wild...
  • throwbadubadu 3y ago
    I simply hate this world with everyone wanting to shove an app to your smartphone (which you maybe don't even have, what about those people?).. sigh. Usual icing on cake: Experience worse or broken than longtime working and more accessible previous solution. :(
  • ransackdev 3y ago
    Even with the app, you're still relying on APNS and GCM for push notifications, so it's not really getting "proprietary infrastructure you have no control over" out of the critical path. Granted, Apple and Google push services rarely go down, but it's still funneling public safety alerts through a non-government entity, and last I checked (years and years ago) there were no metrics or insights into deliverability, retries, opens/clicks/views, etc, plus those services do have rate limits too. The push api is a thing now, and it can send notifications to clients even when the site is not open[1]. Imo they'd be better off bringing the mobile site back and wiring up a service worker and the push api. All open standards and nobody between them and you :) 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
• bjornasm 3y ago
  >I'm glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this. Its lunatic to think about how much governments have relied on Facebook and twitter to give out information. Have a precense, sure, maybe even constantly post information in form of links to self served content. It just makes no sense to exclusively share information through Instagram or Facebook.
• afavour 3y ago
  > What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols Which will literally fall on deaf ears. Mastodon is the in vogue thing but we’ve done all this before with RSS feeds. The simple reality is that people didn’t use them. The government are meeting people where they are rather than making people come to them. Which in situations like a wildfire is exactly what you should be doing.
  • COGlory 3y ago
    They should be doing both. I should not have to sign away my rights (EULA) to access public services.
    • afavour 3y ago
      They are. All the information is available on the web site.
• zinodaur 3y ago
  > What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols As a Canadian - our government makes uniquely shitty websites. We can't even successfully pay a private company to build tech for us - we end up with billion dollar abominations like the PRESTO card. I don't know what the solution is - but if the government makes a emergency alert site, it will be awful and no one will use it.
  • amatecha 3y ago
    Mayyybe.. "Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada" (formerly Industry Canada) has a pretty decent website[0]. Their information architecture (site structure) isn't so great IMO, but the actual functionality is quite solid. Interestingly it appears to be using Drupal. I wonder if it was put together by a government web dev team or an outside contractor? Whoa, actually I just found they have an entire design system[1] to refer to for any official digital services. Cool! [0] https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    As an American that moved to Canada, I actually like the government websites up here. I can generally find the information/services I need. Of course the basis for comparison is the US.
• dylan604 3y ago
  >Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. While I agree with the sentiment, if you're wanting to broadcast emergency information to as many people as possible, you have to go to where the people are.
• imwillofficial 3y ago
  I work in disaster management. First rule is you go where the people are
  • nicbou 3y ago
    Perhaps it would make sense to have your official website as the main source of truth, and broadcast that fact to other platforms. "News update: [short recap], full details on gov.io/situation"
  • deltarholamda 3y ago
    But most people are not on Twitter. When a disaster is ongoing, radio is a much better medium than something like Twitter.
    • imwillofficial 3y ago
      Both is better still
• n_ary 3y ago
  In Germany, we have this nice NINA app, which updates live warnings from city(as well as several cities for huge disasters) from fire, smoke, heavy storms, bad weather, WW2 bombs blocking & evacuation etc. This is really effective compared to Twitter/FB whatever that some of us don’t like to use. When I visit some other place for vacation, I really appreciate this approach.