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TomVDB | 3 years ago

If it works for a celebrity, it also works in case of a calamity.

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tsimionescu|3 years ago

Who in their right mind would rely on Tweets for a calamity??

Phones have built-in support for emergency messages (that bypass all normal silences and notification hiders, unless you explicitly go into settings and disable emergency message support), and carriers are required by law to broadcast such messages to everyone in range.

Twitter is a niche social network (at least in most of the world) and even of those that use it, a huge number will have various forms of disabled notifications.

Larrikin|3 years ago

As a concrete example of the real world value Musk has destroyed by being so bad at running his vanity purchase, there is the UVA shooting https://time.com/6233609/uva-shooting-twitter-crisis/ .

I personally am rarely on Twitter but it used to be an invaluable resource when you're in an area and don't really have time for a fully fleshed out news article to come out the next day about what's going on on the ground. Block club Chicago was tweeting and retweeting videos of police beating up protesters that night a couple blocks from my apartment in 2020, well ahead of the articles that came out the next day.

It was also interesting to see in real time an active disinformation campaign materialize and disappear that same day. Up until around 1 AM there were a lot of people posting about how the "Proud Boys" were planning to show up or had shown up and encouraging people to bring weapons, then all initial tweets were deleted late at night, with only screen shots or people who had quoted them still being available on the site. But that was a problem I hope would be fixed instead of the removal of the checks to make it all in to a shit show.

ben_w|3 years ago

Given "3 seconds" the calamity message has to be in the same category as "Duck and cover. Now."

jacoblambda|3 years ago

That's the case for NERV(one of the disaster alert systems in Japan) at the very least.

https://twitter.com/UN_NERV

https://twitter.com/EN_NERV

It's used for notifying residents of earthquake, tsunami, and other disaster risks. Residents in japan for most immediate disasters will hear an alert through the national system (via phones, TV, radio, etc) and on top of that residents can check the NERV twitter or other sources to determine what degree of threat it is and what the next best course of action is.

ForHackernews|3 years ago

Does it? Are you sure? I've read reports that say twitter has historically run special-case servers for e.g. Justin Bieber's extremely popular feed.

Lapsa|3 years ago

optly named as "Beliebers"