Post

100%. A huge number of people I deal with in volunteering either don't use social media, or are elderly and can barely use a flip phone.

Post also to Bluesky. BUT post everything vital to every cell tower in the area.

No third party platform, including here, X, Facebook, Instagram, etc. should ever be the only, or even preferred, way to access this critical information.

I found out via the Watch Duty app. Highly recommend for general SoCal+ real time emergency information

I live in Tulare County in the Sierra Nevada foothills - fire country. We always get notifications from CalFire even if they aren't the lead on the fire event. I've never seen important fire info posted on social media that isn't distributed widely and requires an account, certainly never on X.

It’s definitely kind of a piecemeal approach but unless you can get FEMA to push out some guidance, I think it’s the best way to get there. Even so, it’s a pretty solvable problem compared to many in government. 2/2

A few years ago in Nova Scotia, some guy bought a used cop car, tricked it out as a real cop car, had a police uniform and drove around murdering large numbers of people, and the RCMP only let people know on Twitter So many people got murdered by this fake cop, real killer.

Absolutely crazy

So yes, I agree Meta is highly problematic. I dumped Threads, got as many people as I could to switch to signal. But not being able to access critical information timely is bad. Now does FB put that stuff on my feed? No. Or late. I check particular pages after WhatsApp alerts.

Watch Duty is a great resource - especially for evacuations. share.watchduty.org/i/99643?ts=1...

🖐️ account on each but hardly knew yez

This goes for politicians and government officials everywhere. When will they learn? Obama should never have handed Jack Dorsey his phone number.

I don’t use either or Fb. I’d be fucked. This is absolute insanity!

Twitter was fantastic for Christchurch #eqnz . If it happened now I wouldn’t know where to go. BlueSky has an eqnz feed but it’s low activity. Some weather events are covered well-ish here. Does anyone know if Threads does disasters? I wish we had a reliable place.

Yes, that seems pretty clear, but I guess it doesn't have to make sense. FB would be a lot more useful to me if it would show me the local govt accounts I follow promptly instead of a week later. I would go to FB more often.

There are a healthy number of us who won't risk downloading apps from Musk & Zuck, at ALL. As a Californian, I don't understand why law enforcement & emergency alerts are so enmeshed with exploitative, data-invasive hell-sites. 🤔Sites run by architects of our destruction. Why expose us to them?

An interesting article and it seems criminal to rely on social media for critical warnings. In Australia, despite constant attacks from the far right politicians, the national broadcaster, ABC, has immense loyalty on account everyone knows to tune into ABC radio during disasters like bushfire.

Basically, if you don’t regularly visit websites run by literal Nazis, you don’t get to know when a disaster is looming. Seems bad.

In my area, there are very few people who can afford Internet service. Disaster messages passed out over Twitter/Facebook is a disaster of itself. Our county doesn't do it, but the state does.

#1 reason is that many people use neither.

Yes, it’s absolutely multifaceted - thanks for sharing your piece, will read today.

Yup. I remember being in a restaurant in Greece when everyone's phone buzzed emergency and we got links to a site that in English and Greek told us of impending forest fire dangers.

As a child of the 90s, I had many a sick day Price is Right interrupted by EBS tests. They've indoctrinated me into checking reliable sources In case of real emergencies. ::buzz buzz:: (2/2)

Municipalities have to use them appropriately - my municipality sends out automated messages about road closures for parades but not for severe weather events or other types of road and rail road crossing closures.

Sure, but for better or worse there are solutions to that particular problem. Forcing people into a privately owned service is IMO so much worse.

Ok, Fain, get the word out that you can use Xcancel to view any post on the bad site. I routinely use it as I left the site a long time ago.

I’m on neither. Not Facebook, not twitter. Never have been.

I use neither

City of garden Grove ggcity.org/emergency

bsky.app/profile/gove...

Garden Grove has one, also.

From watch duty app. Couple hours old

You should download the @watchduty.org app instead of X or any other social media app.

They don’t have a text sign up service?

bud I’ve been reporting on and doing research on social media and disasters since 2008 little-flying-robots.ghost.io/we-have-to-s...

That needs them to hire someone for the job, versus just adding "post on the town Facebook page" to the list of the secretary's tasks.

addendum: not trying to say michigan has this. but i imagine it wouldn't take long or too much effort to stand something like that up...

Plot twist: they fired all the low level people who do the work to keep the bosses.

Especially Orange fuckin County .

i agree. it should be an "all of the above" type thing...

Plus, maintaining a website locally means a few more people in the district will have a job, which is a good thing in such a terrible economy.

or... do something statewide that is updated in real time from different agencies, and has a funky website. you can give it a bounding box for alerts near your home. also if you allow it, it'll tell you if anything is happening near you. it. is. bloody. awesome! emergency.vic.gov.au/respond/

It reaches people who may not be reachable in other ways. But yeah, they shouldn't be using only social media.

it's starting to show that when broadcasters become untrustworthy, disaster preparedness and emergency communications suffer.

Wtf is California doing

There is something truly horrific about amber alerts directing to X, the csam site.

Nixle was supposed to be this service but a lot of agencies went off that. Just create a live blog on your web site!

Amber alerts also re-route to Twitter.

1000%

Meta and X are being boycotted too

Totally agreed.

Welcome back, Fi. I'm not in CA but I use neither here in TX. We have a system that alerts our phone but I think you have to sign up. I'm going to look into that.

It's not a real emergency information system unless anybody who's got access to a device can see the posts. And if the rich "genius" guy in charge can't explain how this can be enabled for official accounts, and make it happen -- he's no genius!

I think you posted this elsewhere, but here's the link for watch duty's coverage of the evacuation. Link should take you there... share.watchduty.org/i/99643?ts=1...

This has been one of my pet peeves for years. Some of them post only on FB.

There's this page: ggcity.org/emergency with a map of the evacuation area.

THIS IS WHY HE BOUGHT TWITTER. It has always been the water cooler for journalists. So all the businesses and gov accounts thought they had to be there…because that’s where journalists are. He trapped the media ecosystem. It’s wild more people don’t talk about this.

Slow clap for somehow managing to make this Biden’s fault 🙄🙄🙄

In days gone by, local govt tv programming required a cable tv subscription to view. Tech changes, govt use of it doesn't. Publishing public content on non public channels is really idiotic.

We get emergency alerts via text here in Austin. I assume through some kind of agreement with the wireless carriers.

Facebook has a near perfect record of showing me things that I am interested in three days after they occur.

KTLA was all over it this morning, but yeah…

Text to a ParentSquare link (thankfully not gated behind having the app) that said “not affecting anything in our particular area but we are monitoring”

“This is not precautionary. … This thing is going to fail, and we don’t know when,” said Garden Grove Fire Chief Craig Covey during a Friday afternoon press conference. “We’re doing our best to figure out when or how we can prevent it.”

"As I ALREADY STATED on a FRONT PAGE article in the DAILY STORMER, there will be a community street fair this weekend..."

This would be a good a job for the USPS. Users could register physical addresses and mobile numbers. Local governments, state EMA's, and FEMA could push notices based on registered addresses. Would also be a good mechanism for password recovery.

LA has been sending out amber alerts as links to the CHP twitter and not disabling replies to the tweets

feeling like a youtuber doing an ad read, but squarespace is right there. neocities? wordpress? github pages? hell just drop a NOAA-style update in a pastebin the whole point of the web was the open publishing and access

bsky.app/profile/flas...

sigh. it would be boring and annoying but probably possible to get each city set up with a bluesky account that mirrors on their websites. It would maybe be plausible to get the county to set up a PDS so the system is evergreen regardless of bsky continuance. organizing it would be annoying, but...