[edit] And yes, a Presidential candidate owning / operating / profiting from / accepting laundry and bribes on / such a platform is- should be- completely unacceptable.

> What degree of promotion by govt constitutes propaganda?

How does that differ from any information that is distributed through Facebook/Threads/Instagram?

Sure, running a Mastodon that didn't accept non govt users and on which there was no engagement with the public- no different than a website, and as the technology is in every respect less mature, scalable, secure, etc than web platforms, no reason to do it.

> How is it different...

It is tied into the "censorship" issue and who else is allowed to publish. Think about any actual "state" controlled press- China and Russia are famous examples. The only publishable statements are those that align with goals. And there is no user engagement.

Imagine a govt platform with engagement, publishing a controversial statement leading to a large response. There will have to be moderation. How well do those moderation policies align with or conflict with information propagation goals?

A commercially mediated platform has its own incentives and its own business to run, to act in ways that balance concerns. And sometimes it may decide not to permit govt officials to spew what amounts to propaganda. Such a decision would never occur on a govt operated platform, of course.

==

Relatedly, the main subtext from Biden's announcement of course is that Twitter is no longer a viable "official" publishing/engagement platform. Look for many, many other govt bodies to arrive at similar determination.

That's not what I said. You can have a server where only govt officials have accounts, and other people could respond to it.

> There will have to be moderation.

Yes, so?

> Such a decision would never occur on a govt operated platform, of course.

Why couldn't it be structured in a way similar to how PBS operates?

> Twitter is no longer a viable "official" publishing/engagement platform

Your quotes are doing a lot of work there. Yeah, communication via Twitter or Facebook was was never considered official. And it shouldn't be. And honestly, it shouldn't even change if it was happening from their own servers, because while the medium can be useful to get people closer to the "debate", in reality the real action and "official" communication warrants a lot more formality and weight than any microblogging platform provides.

Policy is everything. Lots of engineers don't understand this, as engineers we concern ourselves mostly with the "mechanism" side of the "mechanism vs policy" duality. We think about doing things, moving forward, confronting problems as we go. In reality, we live in a bubble. The real issues are policy domain. Policy is mostly about what not to do.

Non-corrupt government operating a platform requiring moderation involves so, so many "do not do that, you lose" nodes on the decision tree as we presently understand it that there is no winning strategy. The only way to win is to not play that game. Don't get into the business of moderation if you are a non-corrupt government.

> Why couldn't it be structured in a way similar to how PBS operates?

Well, for a few reasons. The main one is that government in general and the US government in particular is extremely powerful. That power attracts attention. Everyone with an interest impacted by the government- which is everyone- needs to attend to that power. The President "favoring" a platform will attract many many parties to that platform, who wish to carry influence or have an impact. Many of these parties have their own immense powers, both technical and policy/informational.

PBS is in literal terms a TINY operator. $700M in revenues last year. A staff of a couple thousand people. As an organization it doesn't have any of the capabilities to operate a real time two way communication platform requiring it to act as a real time moderator against the myriad actions that a China or Russia not to mention countless other actors could throw against it. Of course, many would argue neither does Facebook. But with 100,000 staff and hundred billion+ revenue- it has more of a chance.

Could such an organization be stood up? The policy questions again are- who funds it, to what end? What problem would it solve? There are no good reasons for a govt to spend the $Bs it would require and no good solutions to the first amendment problems it would create.

I appreciate that there is a notion of the "public interest" that one would think everyone agrees on, which is what one imagines governments should be about. There can be a sufficiently common shared understanding of "public interest" in small communities, even scaling to homogeneous states (say, single digit millions of citizens). But "public interest" breaks down pretty quickly with sufficient community heterogeneity.

> Yeah, communication via Twitter or Facebook was was never considered official.

Well, in fact, it was. Prior to Musk, many government agencies had "official" voices/presence on twitter. And much work went into- from a policy perspective- ensuring what was communicated was suitable. Occasionally policy was "made" or announced first on twitter. You will now see those presences increasingly quiet (or loud) quit, due precisely to Musk's failure at the moderation problem.

Twitter was hacked, the POTUS account was used to promote crypto scam, and this is not a "policy" issue?

Threads is owned by a company who has repeatedly involved in scandals about how data is handled, how is that not a "policy" issue?

I honestly don't buy this argument. If the government position was that nothing on social media should be "official" and this is why any presence gets less oversight, okay. If the position is that the presence is official as long as the participants adhere to govt guidelines, okay. But those same guidelines could be applied on a public-owned platform.

What I don't get is that they can claim that their presence is official while on the private platforms but are somehow unable to act in the same way if the platform was public.

Yes, it is, in a way- there is an implicit endorsement. That has to be balanced with the opportunity to craft messages directly to the audience the potentially problematic platform serves. But use does not entail responsibility.

FB/Twitter were/are policy problems, but their operation is not the responsibility of any specific actor in government. The issue is more diffuse.

> Twitter was hacked, the POTUS account was used to promote crypto scam, and this is not a "policy" issue?

Yes, it was a problem for Twitter, because they were the operator. The statements made under the POTUS account were not actually made by POTUS. So not really a policy problem for POTUS.

> Threads is owned by a company who has repeatedly involved in scandals about how data is handled, how is that not a "policy" issue?

Sure, but the government is not the operator. It is not responsible for Meta's failings.

> I honestly don't buy this argument. If the government position was that nothing on social media should be "official" and this is why any presence gets less oversight, okay. If the position is that the presence is official as long as the participants adhere to govt guidelines, okay. But those same guidelines could be applied on a public-owned platform.

Neither of those is the rule.

When a designated government voice speaks, that's "official", no matter what medium through which that speech occurs.

There may be problems with the medium, and the government authorities responsible for regulating those problems will take those issues up with the medium. They are responsible for regulating, not responsible for operating. The government entity using the medium will often continue to do so, even when there is a seeming conflict.

One sees this all the time in the financial sphere, where there are many regulators and many service providers which in theory need to be in compliance with the requirements of the various regulators but every day there are questions and disputes and claims and counter-claims and so forth. It happens all the time that one government agency is making use of a service provider for something while another government agency is suing that same service provider.

> What I don't get is that they can claim that their presence is official while on the private platforms but are somehow unable to act in the same way if the platform was public.

Yeah- it's completely different, if by "public" you mean "substantially controlled or operated by a government entity." Because then government is both accountable and responsible. When it's a private operator, the operator is responsible, and government at best is just accountable, if something really bad happens.

Multiple European Governments have set up Mastodon instances, none of them have required millions of dollars or hundreds of people on payroll. None of social media services are essential to official, institutional communications.

It does not need to be that complicated.

You're right, in an abstract HN bullshit sense. It does not need to be this complicated. Nevertheless it is, for reasons that are much more complicated than setting up a Mastodon instance. You are obtusely ignoring the complications.

Also, "people" complain about everything, it doesn't stop the government from spending however they want.

When there is a will, there is a way. If these are the best "reasons" to not do it, seems like it is just a lack of will to be independent from Big Tech.

You could describe that as "a lack of will to be independent from Big Tech" if you want, but the fact remains there is no rational reason for the government to run and maintain its own social media infrastructure when it doesn't need to, and when almost no one would bother to care if they did.

> Just completely infeasible from policy standpoint for a US govt entity to operate a public publishing platform.

Poor Voice of America :(

Whether it's a government entity, or a large corporation, you're going to have the same issues with procurement:

* Finding software that fulfills requirements on auditing and security requirements.

* Selecting a vendor that fulfills a laundry-list of contractual obligations / legal requirements. They'll need to honor comprehensive Service Level Agreements for government access, and be proactive in patching, deployment, and mitigation.

* Integration with a government-grade Single Sign-On solution like ID.me

* Onboarding resources for agencies and individuals, plus tooling for social media teams

* Setting policies that respect the First Amendment, while also moderating things like hate speech, pornography, etc

The other hurdle for this is funding and staffing to run all of this.

None of this is necessarily impossible, and I think something like this could be really beneficial. But, I don't think the ecosystem of the Fediverse (from a platform or vendor perspective) is necessarily there yet. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Another possibility... couldn't this be operated by PBS, which would then have an extra audience and potentially create new ways to generate revenue?

But I'd imagine that it's probably less red-tape than a government entity self-hosting their own Fediverse infra.

It would also be a moderation nightmare because of the massive amount of precedent, laws, and regulations about official government comms.

The real unsolved problem of social media is moderation. If we could crack that, it might make sense to offer it as a public service. Until then, it’s just a lawsuit waiting to happen.

That said, TikTok has clearly gotten Congress thinking about it.

- Switzerland: https://social.admin.ch

- Germany: https://social.bund.de

- France: https://social.numerique.gouv.fr

- Netherlands: https://social.overheid.nl

Look, if you are young I suspect you cannot imagine a world without social media. If have never left your apartment or still live in moms basement I suspect you cannot imagine a world outside your computer.

Social media has only one purpose: advertising revenue. That ball of wax is not something the adults in the room want to waste their time with.

By definition a social network tries attract a large user base, controls a feed algorithm, ostensibly has SOME information on its users. Social medias sites typically also need SOME moderation, gov't moderating speech would be a nightmare in the US. And you throw in the weirdness of government being in the loop in our social lives. We also already have precedent on NSA, etc and not completely unfounded paranoia on government tracking its citizens.

So you not only would have the perception of government controlling speech, including worries about whatever administration is in control managing that speech, you have the boogeyman of social media and gov't tracking in one centralized place, gov't "in our private lives", and a million things anathema to American culture.

Mastodon instance, mostly for official communication with the fediverse seems fine though.

I think you're missing something. Think about it.

Here is the White House's social media: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/

The US government is in the governing business. They are not a social media company and don't have the desire or resources required to become a social media company and attract the substantial user base they'd need to get people to pay attention.

> Is there anything about the bureaucracy that stops their some small team to setup a Mastodon server on "social.whitehouse.gov" and make this a reality?

I'm sure they've looked at doing that and probably decided that Mastodon is a relatively miniscule player and their efforts were better spent on the existing commercial social media platforms.

And they presumably get Mastodon coverage by hopping on Threads. (if that promise ever came to fruition. I don't know because I don't pay attention to Mastodon anymore, aside from looking at their MAU stats.

Q: What are you allowed to post? A: What congress and the courts decide you are.

They are actually beholden to 1A, but you still can’t commit crimes.

More importantly, it takes the profit incentive away so “engagement” doesn’t matter anymore. The sites will always be there so they don’t need infinite scroll short video blasts to keep you entertained for several hours a day.