>for people who don't use it that's their problem

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.

But what is reliably useful at that point? Radio maybe? I'm not sure how Twitter or a Twitter clone is any more useful than a website. Phone alerts are probably the best choice at that point assuming you don't have them turned off.

Twitter can’t be better than a website because Twitter IS a website!

What Twitter was is better than Facebook, the main other governmental alert platform.

How is it useless? You're in traffic, you check Twitter on your phone, you change your plans. I can't subscribe to an RSS feed on a phone by default

If you get a chance. You're not necessarily going to be in traffic so slow that you can safely do that. Maybe you will, maybe not. Getting an alert means you don't have to guess & keep checking. If there's an additional alert you get it and only then have figure out how to safely check it.

> You're in traffic, you check Twitter on your phone

That is illegal in B.C.

An elected official will not be satisfied with the “that’s your problem” response, because they fear those people will vote them out of office.