Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old
Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old
Many people reported they hit a screen preventing them from seeing the alert unless they signed in.
I mean fuck X, sure, but why is the police posting crucial information on a commercial, privately moderated platform? Why would you just assume everyone has an account with Musk's service?
I've seen this shit in Europe too - with everyone just assuming you'll have WhatsApp. At least most EU governments don't use it exclusively, but I'm certain countries, like Turkey, WhatsApp is the only channel where information can often be found.
This is what happens when governments rely on a private corporate service for public announcements
Every government should just adopt a fediverse instance of some sort, maintain it and push that to everyone to use as a public announcement service. That way it would not be controlled, manipulated, lost or disconnected if they had full control over it all the time.
If you think Twitter is ever going to give you real news again, you deserve to have your face eaten by leopards.
That's because conservatives are pedophiles who sex-traffic children.
This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can't find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions on the park service's website, but it was using a twitter feed and the top post was "trail is open, come on in!" because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.
There should be some non-profit funded by cities that's basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.
Governments should not be using Twitter. They should all move to Bluesky and Mastodon. If you still have a Twitter account please only use it to encourage people to migrate to other platforms. Don't use it for anything else.
This happened to me in Missouri about 6 months ago. Couldn’t view the amber alert because twitter.
Why the hell would they make the alert link to a post on anything instead of just having the relevant info in the alert? I've had at least 2 amber alerts come through and a few earthquake warnings as well, and they just had all the info you needed in the alert pop up itself.
Ironically, when I tried to load Wired’s story about this travesty, Wired quickly hid the content with pop-over asking me to subscribe.
Twitter has become the worst place to post about service status updates. Logged out users aren't able to see recent posts, so it's useless.
One more example of a private service being used as if it were a utility.
This one is especially egregious considering it's an Amber Alert, but it isn't necessarily unique. Despite the internet being designed as open, it has been taken over by private entities, and any popular service is ultimately controlled by such entities.
It's a hard problem to solve. Look at federated platforms like Lemmy: they take a long time to populate, and their usefulness is partly a function of how successful that population is. By definition, a free, open platform will not have the advertising, reach, or "it factor" of a corporate service. When given the choice between an open platform and a corporate one, we see people choose the corporate one time and time again.
We have taken our open network and handed it, willingly, to private enterprise.
Paywall.
Why are they surprised that someone who is highly sympathetic to sex offenders would want them to get away from their crimes.
Methinks that Elon would tote the security of a Tesla, but something tells me that if a sex offender or child kidnapper were to take it, the sensors would stop updating and it would release a lot of DNA destroying enzymes in the interior and exterior that would destroy crucial evidence inside and outside the vehicle.
I don't see this as Twitter/X's fault (very much), I mostly blame them for linking to a Tweet instead of just sending the details in the Amber alert. Or, here's a bright idea, why no both? Send the details and a link to a tweet for updates.
I haven't been able to even* load* Facebook or X because of some privacy/security setting I must have enabled. Before that fb wouldn't let me see anything without an account and X was pulling really similar stunts, requiring an account for full access, although usually you could read the tweet and a few replies maybe.
It is absolutely bullshit for ALL the information to be on a social media post. I've definitely gotten them before with age and suspect/vehicle or something, and Twitter would have photos and further details like last seen location and clothes.