Twitter is hot garbage, that’s only gotten worse since Elon took over, but this is really just a problem with government agencies/departments using social media websites as primary avenues of delivering information.
Dear fucking god this is the real issue and why Mastodon is the solution because the agencies can have their own self-hosted presence. Is it perfect by any stretch? Oh fuck no, but it’s a lot closer to those groups having an independence and not relying on the corporations good graces for any of it to keep functioning.
When government relies on corporations to function, those corporations can hold a proverbial gun to the governments head and say “now do what we say or we make everything stop working.”
this is really just a problem with government agencies/departments using social media websites as primary avenues of delivering information.
I guarantee that this was not a “primary avenue” for delivering this information.
Edit: I was wrong. Finally got the confirmation that should have been included in the article from the beginning:
The alert popped up on the phone with the link, which people could not see.
But instead of conveying vital information that could help locate the victim within the notification itself, the law enforcement agency linked to a post from its official X account
Ah. I see. The alerts were conveyed directly to phones via primary avenues: Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and Emergency Alert System (EAS). Those alerts included a link to their Xhitter account.
Every Amber alert I’ve seen has included location, name of the adult, license plate, vehicle description, a description of the child, etc. Most include come kind of link (secondary avenue) that (in my experience) just shows the content from the alert, and doesn’t actually provide any further detail.
Have we confirmed that this alert included only the link to Xhitter, without the other data? If that is actually the case, it’s not just the CHP’s failure, but also the managers of the WEA and EAS systems: They aren’t supposed to activate those systems without the actual message.
