I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.
Shit like that grinds my gears.
Meta's users aren't citizens, they're serfs. :(
Things.
The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.
There probably are (and should be) laws or regulations forbidding that, especially because "safety".
OTOH, from the PoV of the lower-level Forestry Service people who decided to do that - I'd guess they're stuck in a miserably understaffed and low-budget bit of a pretty dysfunctional government, and doing traditional safety announcements would cost them 100X the time and headaches of "just put it on Facebook".
Sadly, this is something that needs reliable, local news coverage. Doesn't much matter if that's a "for profit" newspaper magically transported from the Good Old Days of local journalism...or ongoing, ~thankless work in the trenches by a person or few with the skills to set up and run some flavor of local news web site (which could be very niche - say, forestry service stuff, parks & rec news, road closures & construction, etc.).
While I understand, what's the alternative you propose? I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets. Worst yet, I have seen numerous HN threads talking about big ad tech (which most big tech are), claiming their services are totally non essential and a waste of time, and how their life improved since they stopped using these services. This comment goes as far as to call all the users as serfs totally ignoring that many real people and their real use cases :(
I feel its used because it's free and it simply works for most people. I feel the status quo is there because of the lack of a better one. You simply cannot make everyone happy on HN, let alone all people.
Simple: Strike the word "only". It's not that hard to post to several sites and also your own. I'd like some RSS on the main site too. It's not that hard for an individual and it's even easier for an organization with thousands of employees.
I'd prefer the government to host its own data.
I'd also like any site hosting public information to be compelled to serve that information to everyone.
Facebook may not know they're being used like this, and it would be fine for them to object, but if they do want to carry government alerts they should be open to non-users without tracking or shadow profiling.
So? Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN. "We're on a budget, stop whining" is a perfectly valid response, if a such behavior even warrants a response.
And people are free to ignore them and rely on trillion dollar corporations.
I understand your point, but the main point here isn't internet elitism. It's how you justify hosting servers for stuff no one is already visiting. "Not relying on Meta" is an equally HN take.
these organizations can barely update those sites sometimes. what hopes are there in maintaining and posting on their own blog?
The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
But there's the usual "explicit consent" caveat, which Meta will argue they have because the user (as in: habitual consumer of harmful substances) has agreed to it in their TOS.
But then there is also a transparency requirement on automated decision making (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/):
[data subject has access to] the existence of automated decision-making [and] meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject.
This explicitly says that the user has the right to know what logic is employed by automated decision making systems.
Data rights enforcement is nascent/emerging but certainly a space to watch.