I mean fuck X, sure, but why is the police posting crucial information on a commercial, privately moderated platform? Why would you just assume everyone has an account with Musk’s service?
I’ve seen this shit in Europe too - with everyone just assuming you’ll have WhatsApp. At least most EU governments don’t use it exclusively, but I’m certain countries, like Turkey, WhatsApp is the only channel where information can often be found.
deleted by creator
This is part of the fall of Twitter.
There were two paths for Twitter, in the eyes of many idealistic people like me. One path was something terrible like what happened with Musk. The second path was one that treated it as a public commons of the world.
That second path is how many grew to understand Twitter during its rise and peak. This is why there are so many situations where various public and governmental groups used it as a notification feed/system.
You can go on about how they should just start their own ActivityPub based solution, or move to bluesky or whatever. But it’s not that simple for all of them. Nor are all of the groups involved in posting these feeds technically savvy to do so. Twitter made it easy, and it made sense.
The article could have easily been just as absurd if it was about how people didn’t get the alert because the alerts were moved to a mastodon instance and people are upset because they don’t want to have to go through the trouble of picking a server. heh.
It’s so unfortunate that Twitter went this way. No more free and easy api, no more third party apps and tools. No more expectation that everyone is there. No more expectation that public alerts make sense there.
Yes, centralizing all of this is a big problem. And musk is just one example of why. But, it could have gone the other way.
Twitter is hot garbage, that’s only gotten worse since Elon took over, but this is really just a problem with government agencies/departments using social media websites as primary avenues of delivering information.
Dear fucking god this is the real issue and why Mastodon is the solution because the agencies can have their own self-hosted presence. Is it perfect by any stretch? Oh fuck no, but it’s a lot closer to those groups having an independence and not relying on the corporations good graces for any of it to keep functioning.
When government relies on corporations to function, those corporations can hold a proverbial gun to the governments head and say “now do what we say or we make everything stop working.”
That’s why no official service should use commercial social media.
Using (only) corpomedia to announce information at government level should be illegal.
Why can’t they just put the information in the alert directly? That’s what the Koreans did when I was there. Why this extra indirection in the first place?
Or link to an official website with the details.
That’s what happens in my part of the US as well.
going to assume it’s easier to hire a social media intern then train on a cms to post to a website.
It’s really not. Even crappy interns can learn quickly to post to a CMS.
However, that’s not what was being suggested here. Just…include the details in the alert that actually gets sent?
Do do both. The text of the alert and a link for minor updates that don’t warrant a new alert.
Yes this happened to me and my wife.
Alert came in one the phone (screaming at us really) then when you clicked on the notification. Bam blocked because we didn’t have a twitter account.
The mobile carriers and device OEM’s already participate directly in the Amber alert program. Why is X even part of this?
The problem isn’t the alert itself, it’s that cops put Twitter links in the alert. If you want to see what the car, suspect, or victim look like, you need to be able to access Twitter.
Police have been doing this for years now. It’s a fast a cheap way to microblog without buying or supporting something with the city’s budget.
Yup funds, and the web traffic handleability.
My small city (population 89,000) had a 911 outage about 2 years ago. Their solution was to sms text or voice dial everyone with the message “…please dial any county non-emergency number… see a list of numbers at bitly.url…”. The hosted website was hugged-to-death.After fines, it was inevitably cheaper to extend the nearest net backbone closer to our neck of the woods and upgrade all county things with fiber and data centers.
Can’t have those ticket funds going to digital infrastructure when you gotta get up armored trucks to deal with protesters.
Why the hell doesn’t FBI or some other fed agency create tools for shit like this? Why is every city reinventing the wheel?
Because they dont allow marijuana users in government jobs
In Switzerland there is an app called Alertswiss which gets published by the government. They use it for critical alerts and you can also use it to see open warnings and where in the country there might be stuff happening.
Just do the same @California
“Stat tuned for an important Government Announcement!”
Deposit $1 to continue
please drink your verification can and post your hourly “Musk is the best” post to continue
That’s because conservatives are pedophiles who sex-traffic children.
If we’re going by outcomes alone, it seems very likely.
All shitstain muskrat’s shrieking ‘Pedo’ at anyone critical of him really feels like projection in this context.
As most things do when it comes to the exceptionally primitive conservative reptile-brain.
This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can’t find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions on the park service’s website, but it was using a twitter feed and the top post was “trail is open, come on in!” because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.
There should be some non-profit funded by cities that’s basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.
Ironically, when I tried to load Wired’s story about this travesty, Wired quickly hid the content with pop-over asking me to subscribe.
I don’t see this as Twitter/X’s fault (very much), I mostly blame them for linking to a Tweet instead of just sending the details in the Amber alert. Or, here’s a bright idea, why no both? Send the details and a link to a tweet for updates.
People complain about being annoyed by amber alerts on their phones anyway
