Kind of a false opposite you got there.

The government could put it's decisions and publications on a website, official, verified, more or less controlled by them. There's no reason that has to be done with consultant scams - oppositely, posting on Twitter doesn't guarantee consultants aren't raking in money for adding or removing periods or whatever.

I don't know, it'd probably take 18F like a month to add a page to whitehouse.gov called "Things the President said", add 2FA and whatever else it needs to be installed on his government phone, and a little bot that listens for whenever he writes something on there and tweets it on Twitter. Then you have a source of truth that we know wasn't modified between the government and the reader, and it doesn't break the social following.

But I guess its easier to just complain about Twitter.

> (Also if they don't create an "official account", someone else will do it for them)

What do you mean? How would anyone not affiliated with a given government agency convince human verifiers at Twitter that they're official?

They don't have to convince any verifier. They don't have to be verified. If there's no official account and you create an account with a reasonable name, reposting every post from the official feed, you can get significant following. A lot of the followers will not care whether it's official or not and may not question an extra information appearing on the feed one day.

Well, put it this way: why is Donald Trump listed on Twitter as @realDonaldTrump?

If you don't snatch up your (organization's) name first, someone will surely do so for you.

(Honestly not trying to incite anything by using him as an example; I just hardly use Twitter and he was the first to come to mind.)

They own the non “real” one too, he’s just too much of a tool to use it.

Probably acquired later and didn't want to lose his followers.

Once a public official leaves office twitter should remove all followers to zero.

> Also if they don't create an "official account", someone else will do it for them

Yes, but this account will still not have the same legitimacy. Right now, if Trump tweeted a declaration of war, it would have been reasonable to assume that it was real, because, for all we know, it's an official channel. Previously at lot of people would've at least checked back with the official channel before taking it for granted.

And, to make matters worse, having Twitter as an official channel now gives everyone at Twitter the possibility to make official announcements - hardly a good state of affairs.

Why do you say this? What about "the other way" would make the logic any different?