We lived on O'ahu when it happened and the topic still comes up occasionally. At the time, it was quite traumatic for myself, my wife, and our kids. I spoke to a large number of people who were still in a state of shock in the following week. At least one person died of a heart attack.
Errant tweets or text messages like this from positions of authority have the potential to have very real and major effects on people's lives. Don't downplay the power they hold.
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
I turned on the radio and FM stations were playing the Emergency Broadcast System's well known emergency tone followed by a computerized voice playing the same message as above on repeat.
When faced with this information, time is of absolute essence. The price of taking your time to doubt things and evaluating the veracity of the information means you're not acting to potentially prevent the immient death of yourself and your family.
In this scenario, you cannot expect people to do anything but take things at face value and seek immediate shelter.
People who think they're "good at evaluating information" and ignore emergency notifications can and do quite often end up dead.
The core rule for any alerting system is to trigger if and only if those-to-be-alerted must take some sort of action. In this case, I was tired, pardon the pun, of being blasted out of a deep slumber at 3am for an earthquake that was so weak I could not feel it.
The only action I needed to take was to try and fall asleep again, which isn't terribly easy after your phone has jacked itself to maximum volume with urgent news of impending doom.
After the fourth time in something like two weeks, that alarm was disabled. It was useless.
Kudos to the designer for the earthquake alarm sound, though. That bit does its job brilliantly -- it instantly grabs your attention without deafening you, and you know exactly what is going on.
This Twitter incident is a complete joke in comparison. While you should certainly be judicious if you're in any sort of significant communications role, I really don't care what's on USSTRATCOM's Twitter. I didn't even know they had a Twitter nor would I consider the information there more than a frequently updated newsletter. Give the employee a break, it's really not that big of a deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_ra...
> The response may have reflected newspaper publishers' fears that radio, to which they had lost some of the advertising revenue that was scarce enough during the Great Depression, would render them obsolete. In "The War of the Worlds", they saw an opportunity to cast aspersions on the newer medium: "The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove that it is competent to perform the news job," wrote Editor & Publisher, the newspaper industry's trade journal.[2][55]
> William Randolph Hearst's papers called on broadcasters to police themselves, lest the government step in, as Iowa Senator Clyde L. Herring proposed a bill that would have required all programming to be reviewed by the FCC prior to broadcast (he never actually introduced it).
And we all know Hearst would have no incentive to gin up something to make radio look bad and newspapers look better.
> Few contemporary accounts exist outside newspaper coverage of the mass panic and hysteria supposedly induced by the broadcast. Justin Levine, a producer at KFI in Los Angeles, wrote in a 2000 history of the FCC's response to hoax broadcasts that "the anecdotal nature of such reporting makes it difficult to objectively assess the true extent and intensity of the panic.[56] Bartholomew sees this as yet more evidence that the panic was predominantly a creation of the newspaper industry.[57]