Members of Parliament reacted with incomprehension to a warning message from the NL-Alert system that was sent to people in Noord-Holland about the severe storm that struck on Wednesday. People were directed to Twitter for news and updates about the storm, while that medium has been inaccessible to people without an account since last weekend.
Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but is there something else (that currently exists) they can use that would get as many eyeballs on the alert? No one watches TV anymore. If they were to use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for alerts, they’d hit 90% of the population.
The alert was already sent directly to everyone’s phone. The issue is that it directed people to Twitter for updates, when it could have just as easily pointed to a national weather service site.
Twitter used to be very reliable, that is no longer the case.
In this case they blocked access and that is the problem. Twitter decided, with no warning, to block all access without an account and logging in.
There is no guarantee this or worse will not happen again.
This broke the system in place. That is my point. Social media in private hands cannot be relied on to provide a time critical alerts like this.
The governments around the world screwed up by seeding this system to a private company that can be trusted to maintain a service. But they did it for the usual reason, it was cheap to implement.
What advantage does social media have over a basic website, other than the ability to spread through engagement? In a situation like this, I see no practical reason why they’re not directing people to a government site along with social media.
I think the answer is just basic laziness, because it’s easier to have some intern send a tweet than update a website, so we’re offloading necessary functions to mercurial and unreliable capitalists. And that always ends well…
The main advantage is that people would get the alerts as notifications from the app. It’s not much different than sending alerts by email or SMS which are also privately controlled. But, those systems have maintained a reliable amount of freedom where as Twitter has gone off the deep end.
See, this is where you’re right, but very wrong. You are correct in that text and email are privately controlled, but they arent comparable to Twitter - in scale, composition and ownership.
Email and SMS are open protocols that are not controlled by any one group, and the systems are all interoperable and open standards control how they work. Twitter is a privately controlled platform with no visibility into how it works, no interoperability with other services. The better comparison would be email and SMS to the fediverse.
That goes back to openness, standardization, and interoperability of email/SMS. Because of all those items, no one person can disrupt communication because there’s no central control.
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