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.
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.
This is more like updates on an ongoing situation. Social media is a reasonable way to deliver that.
Yes, signal usage is a bit easier to jump on top of as the government regulates those uses of signals. There really isn't a way to do that on the internet. Best they can have is to regulate that Twitter has to give them unlimited limits in emergency cases. Which, yes, they should do.
This will annoy a ton of "free market" folks, as it will almost certainly make it harder to enter the market as a competitor. Will look a lot like regulatory capture, all told.
No, government owned cell towers, military owned cell towers, etc., also send out the signal, so even if every commercially owned cell tower suddenly vanished most cities will still be covered by enough signal strength for a few hundred bytes of text.
If you hear the siren you're supposed to seek shelter and then tune in to find out what's going on. This is an effective way for dealing with any emergency, even outside of tornados.
Everywhere in a city, and more scattered the farther you go out.
If you ever lived in the Midwest, it's the same things that do the monthly-or-whatever tornado alert tests (and real tornado alerts).
> And who decides to blare the klaxons?
Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever
It's definitely city-level, in at least some places. I know because I was visiting a friend and heard the sirens go off. I assumed it was a tornado warning (i.e. actually serious), but it turns out that city (and only that city in the area) is dumb and blare the sirens for severe thunderstorm warnings, basically crying wolf every time.
Even in America, I can't imagine someone suing the city because they got injured during a storm, let alone winning their case and making the city pay.
The real story was someone got killed by lighting, and the city decided to "do something" so that never happened again. However, IMHO, they're going to shoot themselves in the foot because their citizens are going to be less papered for a tornado, which could kill many more people.
In Germany, you absolutely can. It's called "Verkehrssicherungspflicht". Given how Americans can get sued by a random child wandering onto their property and injuring themselves on a trampoline or a swimming pool, even if the area is fenced off, I assumed that liability for natural disasters would be just as insane.
Here it's mostly fire departments and town halls that have the sirens, and they are controlled by the town hall, département (one level above) and the interior ministry, so each of these level can decide to blare the sirens it is responsible for.
It basically never happens except in real bad circumstances.
Actually I said "here" but I don't live in France most of the time, and here in Belgium it's only based on the phone network now, no sirens anymore.
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.
You should publish to multiple platforms if the message is deemed important. Nothing wrong with duplicating messages across private and public infrastructure websites.
I think this could make sense since it's effectively an application/presentation layer abstraction, platform-agnostic, free to use, and with servers available for licence-fee-free on-prem hosting, e.g. by the governments trying to send these alerts out -- so govts could be responsible for uptime as well as how to present data to users.
Of course, this raises in my mind two issues:
- How can this clearly improve on the existing emergency alert systems? (I'm thinking better geographic granularity and rich media, but that might not be a strong argument)
- Would most people be ok with having this software on their phones? (This is coming from a place of having friends and relatives who still believe COVID exposure alerts were a government spying program of some kind)
This is also working on the assumption that the government is both technically competent and design-minded enough to both have high uptime and present data in a readable way, and I may very well be ignoring some downsides of using ActivityPub that I just don't know about.
Have also seen extreme weather alerts, and one nuclear warning.
Think of Mastodon what you want, but a government using an open standard for communication should be applauded.
In case of issue with one platform at least a place where to broadcast still exists and people can share it, create new copies, share on their own timelines, or other creative alternative ways to share the broadcast.
It was called Twitter.
Federation should solve this.
Until twitter makes an actual emergency alert system, Twitter is not better than a dedicated alert app.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/05/10-facts-...
https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/wa...
even with the best intentions this is not going to reach everyone.
what if the app is not compatible with my phone?
what if i am travelling? should i download an app for every country i visit?
just give me a website address where i can subscribe to notifications. and offer different ways to access the notifications (including twitter and their own mastodon server, but also telegram channels and others (does whatsapp or signal have something like telegrams channels?))
Traditional emergency alerts would take over all live media in the area, ie interrupt TV and radio broadcasts. In high risk towns like in tornado country they have literal klaxons that blare the warning to anyone within earshot.
As much flak as it got, the UK emergency alert system is a pretty good solution - collaborate with cell networks and the developers of the major phone OS's to push a notification to anyone in the at-risk area. It'll never truly be universal, but 80% of phones were capable of receiving the last test, and of those 7% didn't receive it. Honestly that's a much better reach that we ever would have had with radio and TV alerts.
there are different levels of alerts. obviously the really serious ones should be pushed as you say, but lesser ones, or serious ones but for people who are not in the region should be opt-in. there is no need for me to get tornado warnings from the area where my grandma lives, but i may want to subscribe anyways because i want to see her safe and maybe i am planning to visit. so it does make sense to publish alerts on channels that anyone can follow as they need.
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.
Turns out they used twitter because that's where the users were.
So, the requirements are more than a website, but also not a private 3rd party platform w/o service guarantees, and preferably something that doesn't have municipality, department or agency rolling their own solutions, duplicating effort, etc.
In the US the traditional systems are Emergency Alert & WEA but those don't encompass all the public awareness & notification needs that drive organizations to use something like Twitter. I'm not sure if the right answer is to expand those or creating something similar for scenarios currently outside their scope, but we could do worse than starting the conversation with that question.
The online strategy so far, has to be where the people are, so most governments have multiple social media accounts, like Facebook and Twitter, and also websites and RSS. I’ve also seen, depending on the government, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, etc.
The reality is that when it comes to spreading info to citizens you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
In other words, 'website' is visited. Information is accessed and sent back to the requester.
That's not how it works. Unless it's the foreground application, the application is not running; it's not kept open in the background. Instead, what happens is that the application registers with a push notification system when the user first opens it and logs in. When the user should be notified, the website sends a message to the push notification system's central servers, which notifies the phone (the push notification system does stay open in the background, but it's shared by all applications in the phone), which then starts the application on the phone to show the notification.
That said, does it change twitter's status as a website that just happens to have functionality X ( push notifications )?
Well, apart from the app
related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server
If that is the case, app is just a bastardized website.
You're evacuating, driving along a highway, and during the course of your trip the available evacuation routes change. A website is useless here.
The context of the conversation is emergency situations, that has to be taken into account when thinking about the required public notification infrastructure.
What Twitter was is better than Facebook, the main other governmental alert platform.
That is illegal in B.C.
A government agency governing what is acceptable speech is a bad idea.
The draw of the twitter-like approach is that the government messages are a portion of an existing stream of communication that people are already using/consuming.
This exists, and is called Wireless Emergency Alerts. Every phone sold in the U.S. today supports this out of the box.
Blog post here: https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
The most common refrain that I get whenever this topic comes up is "First Amendment" - meaning that public funded social media should not be in the business of moderation; though I often wonder how come NPR, PBS, BBC and so on don't run their own social media websites (based on your deciding flavor of ActivityPub instances.)
I believe the German and Dutch governments run their own Mastodon instances, I don't understand at the moment why other governments don't follow this path.
You work for who pays you.
Platforms that censor are going to win in the marketplace, because that’s what most people want in a discussion platform.
Twitter was fantastic for that kind of thing though.
Child alert systems find about 50 or 60 kids a year (US). Turning them off is a pretty shit move for the ~dozen per year that come through.
> if you miss one for any of the many reasons that could occur in an emergency(
"It's not perfect so why bother?" Is an odd attitude. Per the above, I keep on emergency weather alerts even though I might miss some.
>I wouldn't know where to go to seek out those alerts.*
You can fix that. I know where to go for such things during adverse weather events, and when an AMBER alert has been issue for a kid I'm often curious enough to see if it's been called off a few hours later.
As far as I know, the only options on my phone for these alerts are "deafeningly loud alarm" and "entirely disabled." After my phone woke me up at 3 AM for some kid being abducted in some other town, it's now off permanently. I did the same for weather alerts after it destroyed my ears to tell me about some flash flooding alert on some street across town that I will never use.
There is literally no situation in which my phone making a deafeningly loud alarm is acceptable, so I turn all those alerts off to make sure it doesn't happen again. If the implementation were better, I might leave them on. But it isn't, so I don't.
The horizons of your thinking appear to be truncated to somewhere within a few dozen yards and ~10 minutes of your current time & location. Can you think of no incident where there was an otherwise avoidable death or injury that could have been prevented with a timely alert?
I think there should be a third option, which is to treat them like normal notifications. This is so obvious to me that I'm utterly baffled that it isn't an option. We probably wouldn't even be having this discussion if the option existed. But it doesn't, so here we are.
I would even OK with deafening noise being the default. I would argue that it shouldn't be the default, as I think the false-alarm problem is a serious one that will cause people to just turn it off. But I understand the other side of the argument.
My opinion is anything that causes a bunch of deafening noise from every phone in the vicinity should be treated with the same level of gravity as turning on the tornado siren. We don't turn on the tornado siren for every kid who gets lost or every flooded road. We shouldn't be blowing up every phone for those events, either. Tornado coming to town? Ok, blow up the phones. Missile coming down from the sky? Ok, blow up the phones. City-destroying wildfire coming in? Ok, blow up the phones. Kid got in the wrong car? Berry St is flooded? Sorry, those doesn't qualify for the tornado alarm, so they don't qualify for blowing up phones either.
This does not counter argument that the GGP comment is incorrect in labelling these systems "mostly useless"
This could be avoided by making the implementation less terrible. I don't know how we arrived at the current situation where they're either deafening, or entirely off. It seems really stupid to me that those are the only options. I would prefer to receive them, but it's not worth waking me up at 3 AM for a flooded road 20 miles away.
That's like saying x = x. Of course if people don't use the system, the system isn't being useful. Contrary to that hypothetical, I am making the observation that people do use the system and often find it useful.
[1] https://kutv.com/news/local/law-introduced-for-new-criteria-...
I'm not aware of citizen vehicle chases being a systemic problem. What other offsetting problems exist that negate the benefits of the system? I don't consider annoyance/disturbance to be sufficient to say it's worse than the disease (which implies it should be stopped, pending overhaul) especially considering the ability to turn the alerts off.
For example in Ontario, every alert is sent out at this authority.
The current system is used in a suboptimal way, at least by authorities in my state.
The overwhelming majority -- over 90% -- of children being abducted are taken by family[0], usually as a part of a custody dispute.
Yeah screw that haha, I'll take the Twitter clone for anything short of actual emergency.
I don't think this could work. Private companies like Twitter can enforce limitations on content that the a government run platform couldn't enforce due to the first amendment.
If it federated with Mastadon (or was a Mastadon instance) then others could seamlessly pull those official comms into their feed without having to ever navigate to the platform. Or, for those of us that don't care to have a centralized feed, we could just go to the instance directly for government comms. No more of this "get nagged by twitter ads while I try to read updates from my local government".
The main difference I see though is that since Mastodon provides RSS feeds, I could at least follow the feed of my country's emergency services without needing a specialised app.
Given the general trust in American corporations, it's not absurd to think some of the 89% of the population that doesn't use Twitter would be more willing to install an application to follow official communication on Mastodon than to use Twitter.
Anyway warnings are just broadcast on the mobile network here, which works fine.
That can only be described as a loss.
One would likely just subscribe to your city's hashtag for large cities or to your town hall's account for small ones, and that's all. The rest works like Twitter (except there is less risk of important posts getting invisibilised by the feed algorithm).
In my fediverse test, I just subscribed to #Antwerpen (as well as #Antwerp and #Anvers but that's a whole other problem...) and I did get relevant and interesting posts. In their small town my parents are subscribed to the town hall's Facebook account (the only reason they signed up to Facebook) and it would work the same on any other app, except it likely would spy on them a bit less. Mastodon's Android app is not a "more custom" app than Twitter or Facebook's apps are, on the contrary I would argue.
I just can't get used to checking this thing more than once every few days and like Twitter it just doesn't work if you're not constantly reading your feed, because then you're missing most posts.
It's called a website.
It's hard to answer this question without knowing your local city. My town of < 5000 people has the appropriate .gov site set up and maintained; it's one of the responsibilities of the local government. I'd imagine that any local government structure large enough to have evacuation plans in place is also large enough to have a website to communicate those plans on...
This was especially useful for things like transit, or emergency situations. If there was a snowstorm, I would check the BC transit Twitter account. When there was an active shooter at my university, I checked the Ottawa RCMP Twitter account.
And I relayed that information to others, including people like you, making sure that even if you don't have Twitter you had the latest information. Now, Twitter can't be relied on for the latest information anymore. Government websites are not real time. There were millions of people using Twitter for this, and now they're no longer going to use the platform. This is absolutely a loss for the platform, no two ways about it.
Plus I don't see where members of the public can post content on PBS for the first amendment to even come into the picture. If an employee posts something objectionable, they can be fired regardless of the first amendment, just like any government employee.
There are no 1st Amendment issues with Amber Alerts or weather alerts pushed to my phone, for example. But if CNN or Fox News are allowed to post to this proposed service, now we've got a different animal.
Some content about manitoba seems like a small price to pay for accurate wildfile info.
That said they just outsourced that shit to a chain of large corporations, all who have lost their contracts for doing really dumb and bad stuff, and they've definitely dropped the ball really hard on emergency warning alert systems working properly before. People could have died in their sleep. [1][2]
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-cha...
[2] https://www.vicnews.com/news/new-national-emergency-alert-sy...
My suggestion is to establish a tweeters anonymous?
I haven't actually noticed much change there. Sure, people seem to be angry about all kinds of things, but that's the normal over on twitter. The core functionality of 'post tweet' and 'see tweets others have posted' seems unaffected for me and every user I follow.
I don't really see what everyone is angry about. "User XYZ did X controversial action and got banned for it" is of no interest to me, partly because I am not interested in User XYZ, and partly because the sorts of things I use twitter for don't revolve around seeing the spread of whatever the next activist thing is.
If you didn't swallow media narratives wholesale and were just using Twitter you'd have noticed very little.
Just because you haven’t hit the limit does not mean the limit does not exist nor that it’s harming the platform.
If you have more than ~10 things to say in a day, then sign up for another account and put links - ie. "CaliGov: wildfires around San Francisco. For more info follow @CaliWildfires2023".
Obviously there should be some UI to show you when you're getting near the limit, but I expect thats coming.
Sure, but this is not your run-of-the-mill user. This is essentially an emergency broadcast service. Most people would follow the account with the desire to see "a million tweets" if those are relevant to the thing they are broadcasting. In fact, the absence of such tweets due to a limit is probably more harmful than the number of tweets that did go out.
> If you have more than ~10 things to say in a day, then sign up for another account and put links - ie. "CaliGov: wildfires around San Francisco. For more info follow @CaliWildfires2023".
That's absurd and spammy for no reason other than to get around a restriction that shouldn't exist for these accounts. And would hit the exact same limits. It's not like they used up their tweets spamming about irrelevant details.
> Obviously there should be some UI to show you when you're getting near the limit, but I expect thats coming.
That's putting a lot of hope into promises that haven't even been made.
His changes to the site were optimized for maximum praise for himself.
He destroyed the verification system that was intended to avoid public figures from being impersonated. Now it's simply people who have bad posts, now getting more attention to their bad posts.
Hateful individuals can now pay 8 dollars to prioritize their hateful posts under their targets' tweets.
Terrible, awful, spoiled little man.
Weird thing to challenge a guy who's been training way hard for a few years now to an actual fight.
Musk has a substantial physical advantage over Zuckerberg that training can't overcome. If they were professional fighters they wouldn't even be in the same class.
I've seen enough street fight videos to know a small guy with training can easily take down a big guy with hubris.
This can't be a serious claim.
So my guess for this matchup is strongly weighted towards a more prepared Zuck being patient, finding openings for a takedown and then winning by submission. That said, it isn't a jiujitsu match, and there won't be gis, which shifts around the techniques available. Elon has a chance if his claim of having studied some martial arts as a teen is true, but he is also a big liar and equally likely to cancel at the last minute.
Personally I don't see what chance Musk has. He looks terribly out of shape, Zuck is younger and much fitter. And apparently he's actively training, rather than possibly decades ago.
This never happened. His parents objected to the fight taking place, but the plans haven't changed any. They've booked the venue and everything.
Generally, older people are more likely to be out of shape because they're more likely to be sedentary. And, of course, if they had a lifetime of bad habits like smoking or drinking, the cumulative effects can be significant.
There's another age-related sports thing -- people who are in professional sports tend to beat up their bodies quite a bit. They age out of their sport, not really directly because of the passing of time as much as because eventually the cumulative damage catches up to them.
[1] That said, I know a couple of people in their mid-60s who could kick the crap out of the majority of 20somethings.
That's why I'm enjoying the whole idea.
Others will of course see a blueprint.
> "Mr Musk has a history of making statements that are not serious or which fail to happen."
Mister Rogers is dead. Sesame Street (CTW) is now a company that markets toys to kids, the same behavior that was alarming when the culprits were Transformers and G.I. Joe back in the 80s.
Today we also have a largely corporate-captured government. The trend is to privatize everything, allegedly because of "efficiency."
However rose-tinted your view of history is, this ain't then.
I think that's a matter of perpsective, considering that Mr. Rogers was a faithful Presbyterian minister.
Mr. Rogers was like the father I didn't have, and he changed me profoundly in my childhood by his direct and candid engagement with the camera, as if I really was a special person that he deeply cared about (and it was true.)
Mr. Rogers left a legacy that continues to change me and other people, especially those of us who grew up under his wing. There are lovely films made, and some of my favorite YouTubers love to sing his songs. I miss him, and he's still very much alive in our hearts, and in the miracle of television recordings.
We can? Functionally none of the controversial changes have been any inconvenience to me. It's been more of a self-fulfilling prophecy as far as I can tell: people declare each change to be the end of Twitter, and the resulting firestorm of tweets about Twitter's changes is actually what degrades the experience of using the product.
That can only mean Twitter can't be relied on for anything other than vanity.
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.
Exclusive for Twitter Blue++ subscribers, only $189/month
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.
Convincing people to return to websites for this kind of thing is boiling the ocean.
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.
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?
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.
Ideally a government-run emergency broadcast website would have literally 0 social features.
> 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.
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” ;)
"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.
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.
To inform the general populace, you go where they are.
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.
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.
>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!
Also, the “temporary” tweet limits are supposedly an anti-scraping, not anti-people-not-paying-for-Blue, measure.
I’m sure snarkily repeating the same thing will change that fact, though, so keep it up!
The first one is obvious. Why should public institutions (or anybody) preferentially line Musk's pockets, especially when every other social media site is free?
The second is more subtle. The goal of this type of social media outreach by government is to make sure the messaging reaches as many people as possible. But Twitter, by instituting these restrictions, also limits the amount of people who can read these essential messages. So even if the government pays, its tweets reach fewer people than before. And thereby the government indirectly discriminates against people too poor to pay the fee.
Why should our governments line the pockets of verizon, cogent, L3, AT&T, when they could just broadcast the messages on a hacked together lorawan chat handheld that my friends and I use to talk to each other at burning man?
You realize Twitter isn't even in the top 10 social media platforms worldwide. Facebook has almost 6x as many users.
>B.C. government refuses to spend $8 to keep their emergency services announcement host account active amid wildfire evacuation announcements.
>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.
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.
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-suspens...
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you can’t self-host, then it’s highly advisable to actually pay for a service you deem critical.
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.
Same here in Poland. I frequently receive messages about extreme weather, counter terrorism exercises, the balloon thing recently.
There are a lot of people saying that in this thread, but I think "the people" have a responsibility here too, no?
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.
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..
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.Wild...
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
Usual icing on cake: Experience worse or broken than longtime working and more accessible previous solution.
:(
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.
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.
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.
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
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html
Of course the basis for comparison is the US.
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.
First rule is you go where the people are
When a disaster is ongoing, radio is a much better medium than something like Twitter.
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.