from Hacker News

B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations

by nosecreek on 7/13/23, 1:09 PM with 385 comments

by mcv on 7/13/23, 1:32 PM
> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency.
I'm glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this.
Don't rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start.
by logshipper on 7/13/23, 2:10 PM
I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how its the government's fault for relying on a private service for public communications.
The sentiment, while understandable (and not entirely unfair), assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$. A Twitter account (well, before the Musk takeover anyway) offered:
a) The ability to disseminate information to essentially anyone with a mobile device and an internet connection. b) Low setup costs, maintenance overhead, and technical expertise needed.
As a taxpayer, I would like my government to be cost-effective in resource allocation - Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way to maintain a 1-->many communications infrastructure. That said, I fully agree that they should explore alternatives in light of Musk's antics.
It is important to also remember that government can be slow when it comes to embracing tech. ActivityPub is only 5 years old, and that's a short-time by govt standards, RSS is effectively (and quite sadly) dead for the everyday folk. This may or may not surprise the readership here, but Ontario's healthcare system still uses faxes to transmit patient records: https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate....
by alenrozac on 7/13/23, 1:32 PM
People will blame Twitter, but imho, a public agency should not rely solely on scale provided to it by a single private platform. It looks like they recognize it too:
> “We've been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications,” said Reynolds. “But it really doesn't work once things change.”
by mewse-hn on 7/13/23, 3:06 PM
I felt like I never "got" twitter and never became a heavy user, so I've been feeling pretty smug about its downfall.
HOWEVER - governments started posting information to twitter because that's where the eyeballs were. It's not really that different from sending out information via the big 3 tv networks - those are private companies as well, but it was the most effective way to get info to as many people as quickly as possible.
Imagine one of the big 3 tv broadcasters dropping the ball on dispersing wildfire information, they'd be abject with their apologies to the govt and the public.
I guess where this comparison falls apart is we never saw an egomaniacal shitlord buy a big 3 tv broadcaster and run it into the ground.
by apozem on 7/13/23, 1:50 PM
Yet another example of how these new Twitter API limits are self-defeating and poorly considered.
A far-sighted Twitter owner would want as many government agencies and news alerts on the platform as possible. The cost giving them API access is dwarfed by the value of making Twitter the place for real-time information. That's the whole point of Twitter.
These agencies provide value to Twitter, not vice versa. Asking them to pay means you don't understand that.
by uncertainrhymes on 7/13/23, 1:37 PM
Twitter is terrible ... except it is still the best real-time broadcast tool available to governments and those without IT staff and budgets. Most local groups around me just stopped trying, or reverted to Facebook. They used it because it was free and easy -- the idea they could build their own alternative and get people to follow it is just impossible for them.
During some recent fires near me the official communication was confused and awful. One retired firefighter just decided to tweet status updates from listening to the operations radio and he became the most reliable source around.
At least the mobile phone alerts worked for evacuations.
by neom on 7/13/23, 1:36 PM
Loads of people commenting under their tweet say the account was unverified at the time so the rate limit was lower, but when you click on verified badge on their profile it says they've been verified since July 2021... weird.
https://twitter.com/DriveBC/status/1675600911782256640
by blywi on 7/13/23, 2:04 PM
The same thing happened a week ago in Hamburg/Germany when the fire department wanted to inform the local population about necessary evacuations for removal of World War II unexploded ordnance that were found during construction work. They had hit their Twitter limit and were unable to post the notice.
In German: https://www.rnd.de/medien/twitter-zugriffslimit-feuerwehr-ha...
by fidotron on 7/13/23, 1:55 PM
One of the oddities of living in Canada is the authorities overuse the amber alert system for when a divorced couple have a fight and someone takes the kids off in a hurry with no problem, but if someone is pretending to be a cop while shooting people and your actual cops are shooting up barns with innocent people hiding in then you're lucky if they Tweet about it. In fact two people died while they were getting permission to Tweet about it, but at least they weren't cops: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/canada-nova-sc...
by voxadam on 7/13/23, 1:56 PM
Amazing, this is almost play-for-play the same screw up Verizon committed when they severely throttled the data usage of firefighters in California during the 2018 wildfires.[0]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...
by AlchemistCamp on 7/13/23, 1:39 PM
Don’t rely on a company’s free tier for anything truly critical.
Either self-host your own solution, built on open source dependencies, or pay a company on a plan with an SLA that meets your needs.
by ghusto on 7/13/23, 4:59 PM
I'm glad this is forcing recognition of something that should have been obvious; private platforms should not be relied on for official government communication (or in my opinion used at all by government, but that's a longer argument).
In the Netherlands, you're _expected_ to have WhatsApp. So many places rely on it. There are even official WhatsApp neighbourhood-watch signs on streets. It's short sighted and frankly, stupid.
by skizm on 7/13/23, 1:50 PM
> Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency.
I draw the opposite conclusion here. I think governments should be using more platforms to blast their messages. Redundancy for mission critical messages is a good thing. They should be using both their own app / infra plus all other social medias that are available. Update your website, RSS feed, send whatsapp messages, send an instagram message, send a tweet, post to your facebook, etc. If someone doesn't want socials, there should be ways to opt-in to texts or phone calls. Ideally they can have one place to enter the message on their end, and a bunch of checkboxes to which socials / channels to post a message too. Behind the scenes it will apply appropriate transformations for specific platforms if necessary (turn words into an image for instagram, split posts if longer than the twitter limit, etc.).
by sigstoat on 7/13/23, 2:20 PM
i’m sure it seems like “everyone” is on twitter when you’re permanently online, but even the peak MAU figures don’t look anything like “everyone” in the US let alone the rest of the world.
any government messaging plan that revolves around twitter was irresponsible. same with whatever other single social media platform you want to name.
by swader999 on 7/13/23, 3:01 PM
Something to be said for this not being used properly by BC gov. If they went over their limit then it was not well thought out, who has time in an emergency to read all those tweets to find one that is relevant to their locality?
by mhandley on 7/13/23, 1:58 PM
Governments by law generally have the power to interrupt traditional media to put out emergency broadcasts. They could just as easily mandate that for any social media company/channel over a certain size to do business in the country, it must carry any emergency information the government puts out for free. It's important the information goes where the population is paying attention. If that requires laws to make happen, governments are pretty good at passing laws, though they're usually far too slow to make the right laws.
by ChrisArchitect on 7/13/23, 2:58 PM
So this is about the API limits --- not what most readers would assume, that someone was typing furiously away sending out updates and ran into an error.
The API limit is crap yep. But there's also been a bunch of messing around with it lately that's broken things and sometimes it's working sometimes not etc.
Anyways, not supporting Twitter on this but posting manually still viable for updates I suppose.
by ChumpGPT on 7/13/23, 3:38 PM
Does anyone listen to the radio for Emergency Broadcasts? This is probably the best way to get info out to a lot of people quickly, there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't use twitter or social media. Could also send out mass txt messages like an amber alert sort of service to all mobile signals in the zone.
by loeber on 7/13/23, 3:55 PM
All kinds of public organizations (governments, fire departments, heads of state, etc.) have been using Twitter to broadcast news for the last fifteen years, as if it were a public utility. But it isn't. And many politicians have been complaining for years about social media not being regulated as such.
With all the kvetching about insufficient regulation and social media being a public utility, you would think that one government somewhere would've built a public utility Twitter alternative for that purpose, right? But nobody has. A few days ago, I wrote in detail about this surprising dynamic: https://loeber.substack.com/p/10-why-is-there-no-government-...
by t0bia_s on 7/13/23, 1:52 PM
I find quite irresponsible to use social network as source of emergency news in first place.
by pbronez on 7/13/23, 1:29 PM
Welp, that's terrible. Key question: how would a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub service) have fared here?
There are companies that offer alert broadcasting services (e.g., [0]). Have any of them started to support ActivityPub? Could they make 1:m focused platforms that implement a subset of the standard really well? Do we need to define a subset of ActivityPub that increases efficiency for this kind of mass communication?
I have no answers, only questions
[0] https://voyent-alert.com/us/communities/municipalities/
by acyou on 7/13/23, 2:52 PM
Were 1500+ short form text messages per month really ever an effective means of communication for emergency purposes?
If these messages are all related to road conditions (Drive BC), would an interactive map, a search engine, a table, or integration with Google Maps not have made more sense here?
It's good that our governments are losing the ability to use this lazy, inefficient, terrible form of communication (thousands of short form messages on a private platform).
Every government agency using privately owned social media as an exclusive channel for communication was/is acting irresponsibly.
by pera on 7/13/23, 1:37 PM
Government agencies should use RSS or ActivityPub for all their communications, it's unacceptable that they depend on a private company like Twitter for this sort of things.
How did we get to this point?
by imwillofficial on 7/13/23, 4:52 PM
Besides the cardinal rule of emergency management reporting, “go where the people are” It’s important to keep up to date with the capabilities and limitations of your lines of communications.
Solar activity can effect radios, storms can effect satellite feeds, and not taking into account policy changes can bump you into rate limits.
This was a failure of the social media team to calibrate during a feature change that came unexpectedly.
This could be a chance to use this bad press on Twitter to pressure then into exempting public good type accounts.
by imchillyb on 7/13/23, 2:36 PM
Declare: eminent domain, public safety, national security, and for the children and seize the servers.
Twitter is a monopoly and should be treated as such. Same with Facebook, reddit, et al.
Sure there would be push back, but after making those companies public trusts with government regulatory oversight who cares anymore?
Oh, yeah, the tyrannical CEOs and boards of directors. They’ll care. But they’d also probably be facing indictments for undisclosed criminal activities, so…
by hermannj314 on 7/13/23, 1:42 PM
Vendor Management is a critical component of an organization. Since the government was relying on Twitter to provide certain service levels and the government was paying for those negotiated services, this should be an easy win based on the contractual remedies that were pre-negotiated.
I mean the BC government is hundreds of years old so they know all of this so it should be a pretty easy win for them. It isn't like this is a new thing.
by dogman144 on 7/13/23, 4:28 PM
Good. Take some tough medicine from this experience and then build public crisis management systems not owned by a product/profit-driven private corporation that’s loosely controlled by a completely separate country.
The moment heads of state were ATO’d to shill crypto scams by a teenage in Florida iirc in 2019/20 should have been the final straw in relying on twitter for public interest.
Next, get PTAs and local govts off Facebook pages.
by joshe on 7/13/23, 3:38 PM
Unclear from the article, but maybe they can just pay $8?
An expensive enterprise account is mentioned, but no linkage as to whether they would be forced to use it.
by pierat on 7/13/23, 4:01 PM
They could EASILY sign up for a Canadian Mastodon instance..... Or they could make their own Mastodon Govt instance.
They don't control the man-child at the helm of Twitter. But they can definitely control their own servers. And I'm sure plenty would federate with their Masto instance, since it could easily be scoped to govt stuff.
Control your own servers, control your own data. Control your own destiny.
by TrickardRixx on 7/13/23, 2:27 PM
Every phone in my office screeches a couple times a month with Amber Alerts for missing children several hours away from my location. We already have a channel for mass broadcasting emergency alerts to every mobile device. Why was Twitter ever the platform of choice for this?
by paganel on 7/13/23, 4:05 PM
Doesn’t Canada have a country- or state-wide emergency alert system that involves sending messages directly to people’s phones? (including “dumb” ones). Because that would make a lot more sense than relying on a private app, or on any app, for that matter.
by padseeker on 7/13/23, 2:41 PM
Where are all those fanboys who whenever Elon would make a bone headed move, they would correct you about how no Elon is a genius and here's why. I desperately want to hear what they have to say this time.
by api on 7/13/23, 1:41 PM
Was social media ever a reliable platform during emergencies?
by ibejoeb on 7/13/23, 2:04 PM
I have questions:
1. Does Twitter even know about this?
2. Did the transportation minister bring this to Twitter? I mean, if it's such a big deal, is it worth a ring, email, or DM?
3. Did Twitter refuse to uncap it?
I don't know if the reporting is sloppy, or if there is an agenda, or whatever, but there are acknowledgements by the government that they were lazily relying on Twitter without any kind of formal arrangement.
If I'm handling comms for the ministry, I would go to twitter with a public weal request that it designates critical information accounts with no practical rate limits and that are visible to all without sign-in. They have the capability. Someone needs to initiate it.
by shkkmo on 7/13/23, 1:58 PM
The article leads off with "Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency."
But later down the article admits:
> Twitter has put new rules in place that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying
So if the B.C. government had bothered paying for the service rather than relying on a free account to disemminate mission critical info, there would have been no issue.
So this is really just yet another biased Twitter hit piece rather than actual journalism.
by riffic on 7/13/23, 3:37 PM
push your elected officials to adopt policy requiring public sector agencies make use of ActivityPub oriented services, whether they're Mastodon, Pixelfed, or even just WordPress with the AP plugin installed.
This has been a huge problem with Twitter, noted by many in the emergency communications sector going back at least 2 years or longer.
by dynamorando on 7/13/23, 3:37 PM
Why isn’t there funding for public social media? Doesn’t Germany and the Netherlands run their own Mastodon instances?
by cubefox on 7/13/23, 1:55 PM
1.500 tweets per month are 50 tweets per day, every day. Do people really follow when they get flooded like that?
by mkoryak on 7/13/23, 4:23 PM
> Twitter did not respond to Glacier Media's questions.
They probably responded... with a poop emoji.
by yazzku on 7/13/23, 3:40 PM
Sounds like they learned proprietary infra doesn't pass for public infra the hard way.
by stainablesteel on 7/13/23, 1:47 PM
radio stations are already used for this, this isn't a failing of twitter imo
by sidewndr46 on 7/13/23, 5:57 PM
maybe, just maybe government should not depend on private for-profit companies for essential communication
by sigzero on 7/13/23, 5:14 PM
You should NOT be relying on something like Twitter for an emergency announcement system. That is just asinine.
by dirtyid on 7/13/23, 6:39 PM
Bring back radios.
by interestica on 7/13/23, 4:36 PM
SMS.
by romusha on 7/13/23, 1:52 PM
People still use twitter?
by dudeinjapan on 7/13/23, 2:17 PM
Did they pay the $8 fee for a blue check? The limits are a lot lower if they didn’t…