Casey NewtonThere are so many ways to break a website and by the time he is done Elon will have personally overseen all of them
BTW this is why it was stupid for all those government / emergency services accounts to resume posting on Twitter. Absolutely unreliable in critical situations
Ian Servin@caseynewton I dunno if that's fair. As an emergency services person, it's not like we have much of a choice. Changing how we do public alerting and messaging is not something we can do overnight, and for good reason.
My grad school capstone was on social media use in the emerg mgmt world and unsurprisingly agencies are extremely under-resourced when it comes to social media comms. Relying on them to lead vs follow best practices and trends is unrealistic imho.
@airplaneian I hear you but you're giving your community a false sense of security by suggesting that they can rely on Twitter to find out about emergencies. The downside risk of that is enormous imo
@caseynewton Many agencies have spent time in recent months informing their audience about other places they can receive messages
but we can't just stop posting on twitter overnight, that has immediate real world consequences to the people that do still rely on that vector for information
in the world of life safety, you have to be conservative about your decision making... I think expecting us to abandon a platform in protest is not actually the kind of behavior you want from emerg svcs
@airplaneian it's not even about protest ... it's that Twitter can no longer reliably serve as a real-time information source in critical situations. It's like saying "we can't stop using this fire truck any more just because it doesn't have an engine”
@caseynewton sure but even if I think public comms are just as essential as a fire truck, I'm not the one you have to convince
priorities are instantiated by funding and the money comes from elected officials... you gotta convince them first
it's not like we're not having that fight, but we don't have many resources to fight it successfully
@caseynewton I'm not saying you're wrong, I just think the reality of how decisions get made at public agencies doesn't line up with your expectations
we don't need criticism, we need resources and support to do the right thing
@caseynewton I can tell you that agencies are trying to figure out what the best course of action is, but decision making is deliberate by design and unfortunately public comms is one of the areas that has the fewest resources in most agencies
what we really need is resources and best practices around how to abandon twitter so communicators can prove to bosses/electeds that there is a viable path forward
we have to prove we're making the right choice, not just act unilaterally
Alan Buxey@airplaneian @caseynewton oh, you can post on Twitter but it's now unlikely that people will see that post...