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 wonder why such an important piece of info is posted on social media but not on a dedicated webpage that can be linked to any social media posts.
Yay, privatization? Just post it to a social media platform so the official org doesn’t have to dedicate IT resources or further effort to it?
Social media has a very good ratio of information spreading versus effort required. It's also why it's a popular thing for misinformation and influence campaigns.
In contrast, if a government agency wants to make a website for this, it probably needs a proposal, budget request, approval by a commission, a bidding process, and other bureaucatic procedures put in place by politicians that wanted to lower spending.
And we got news like this.
Addition: Difficult, cumbersome, and bureaucratic to do doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. Those are just purely excuses.
And remember the attempt to abandon AM radio as a standard for diseminating emergency information.
I mean, it's not like people would check that dedicated webpage on their own, and they are less likely to click on that webpage to get the additional details. Just put it on the platform most people are using and don't add extra steps to see what's needed.
If they're looking to Xitter it could be copy/pasted instead, but then updates get harder to manage.
Just put it on the platform most people are using and don’t add extra steps to see what’s needed.
Most, but not all people should be a deal breaker for a public service announcement.
That was my take. Still is, but was before, too, although I have concerns about it. I don't even use xitter. It's an unfortunate conundrum and I don't know the answer. We are clearly seeing the results of channeling government communications through private platforms where information can be gatekept. But what's the alternative? I agree that the government website should be the primary source and private platforms the secondary source, but, much in the way US-market cars hide the "real" tail lights in/under the trunk in order to put "aux" tail lights on moving trunk/tailgate panels, that's just not how the general public will use it.
People want to be entertained. Getting info through private media is the most we can hope for. People don't want to get real news media, let alone their local government's attempt at a blog site. I know we get amber alerts direct from the cell network to some unique software on phones, but I imagine rolling out some more-frequent alert system will cause a ton of privacy/freedom backlash crying about being one goosestep away from China.
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.
The Dutch government used Twitter for a lot of information (though this was often if not always found on their own websites as well), but now they host their own Mastodon instance for any gov related stuff that can be used by government agencies in conjunction with or as a replacement for Twitter. Which is pretty cool imo.
Our police do the same in Australia with Facebook and I can't view them
This is part of the fall of Twitter.
There were two paths for Twitter, in the eyes of many idealistic people like me. One path was something terrible like what happened with Musk. The second path was one that treated it as a public commons of the world.
That second path is how many grew to understand Twitter during its rise and peak. This is why there are so many situations where various public and governmental groups used it as a notification feed/system.
You can go on about how they should just start their own ActivityPub based solution, or move to bluesky or whatever. But it’s not that simple for all of them. Nor are all of the groups involved in posting these feeds technically savvy to do so. Twitter made it easy, and it made sense.
The article could have easily been just as absurd if it was about how people didn’t get the alert because the alerts were moved to a mastodon instance and people are upset because they don’t want to have to go through the trouble of picking a server. heh.
It’s so unfortunate that Twitter went this way. No more free and easy api, no more third party apps and tools. No more expectation that everyone is there. No more expectation that public alerts make sense there.
Yes, centralizing all of this is a big problem. And musk is just one example of why. But, it could have gone the other way.
The article could have easily been just as absurd if it was about how people didn’t get the alert because the alerts were moved to a mastodon instance and people are upset because they don’t want to have to go through the trouble of picking a server. heh.
You can view mastodon posts without being forced to make an account. This use to be the case with Twitter before it was turned into X.
Amber alerts do go out via phone alerts to everyone in the area. They're probably just supplementing that with a Twitter post since you can refer back to it.
Twitter is hot garbage, that's only gotten worse since Elon took over, but this is really just a problem with government agencies/departments using social media websites as primary avenues of delivering information.
Dear fucking god this is the real issue and why Mastodon is the solution because the agencies can have their own self-hosted presence. Is it perfect by any stretch? Oh fuck no, but it's a lot closer to those groups having an independence and not relying on the corporations good graces for any of it to keep functioning.
When government relies on corporations to function, those corporations can hold a proverbial gun to the governments head and say "now do what we say or we make everything stop working."
this is really just a problem with government agencies/departments using social media websites as primary avenues of delivering information.
I guarantee that this was not a "primary avenue" for delivering this information.Edit: I was wrong. Finally got the confirmation that should have been included in the article from the beginning:
That's why no official service should use commercial social media.
it's so easy to host an ActivityPub server oneself, there's really no excuse for a government agency not to be doing that instead of relying on ex-Twitter
it’s so easy to host an ActivityPub server oneself
Tell that to the 60+ y/o’s in charge who dread email.
Hell, at this point I’d be content with gov’t institutions using a literal blog website for stuff like this… as long as it’s publicly accessible.
edit: who downvotes this? state your reasons? have you talked to the average office worker 50+? at least where i live, the situation is looking pretty bleak with regard to “tech” (read: basic computing) task understanding/fondness/preference…
Using (only) corpomedia to announce information at government level should be illegal.
As of Jan. 20th, they will fully be one and the same.
Municipal governments go where the people are.
People need to leave Twitter, that's the real problem.
How do you think amber alerts work in general? The telecoms lease frequency from government, but they go through the corporate telephone system.
The problem here isn't corporate or not, it's a specific police department making decisions that don't make sense, namely sending out data on a specific corpo platform without a legally binding agreement that this information will reach people.
In contrast, my county for example also contracts through a corporation, but that corporation is purpose built to provide municipalities with guaranteed (as much as this is possible) delivery.
Why can't they just put the information in the alert directly? That's what the Koreans did when I was there. Why this extra indirection in the first place?
Or link to an official website with the details.
Yeah, that was my thought. Put a page on their government website. I would recommend their state department of homeland security for emergency services
Make a subpage: https://www.caloes.ca.gov/office-of-the-director/operations/homeland-security/
Their mission statement on that site fits perfectly with it:
"We protect California by leveraging partnerships, bolstering capabilities, illuminating threats, sharing intelligence and advancing the Homeland Security Strategy."
That's what happens in my part of the US as well.
Possibly laziness and/or wanting to link to an "official" source.
Instead of publishing 34 more alerts, a interested person could just follow the account.
going to assume it's easier to hire a social media intern then train on a cms to post to a website.
It's really not. Even crappy interns can learn quickly to post to a CMS.
However, that's not what was being suggested here. Just...include the details in the alert that actually gets sent?
Do do both. The text of the alert and a link for minor updates that don't warrant a new alert.
Yes this happened to me and my wife.
Alert came in one the phone (screaming at us really) then when you clicked on the notification. Bam blocked because we didn't have a twitter account.
The mobile carriers and device OEM's already participate directly in the Amber alert program. Why is X even part of this?
The problem isn’t the alert itself, it’s that cops put Twitter links in the alert. If you want to see what the car, suspect, or victim look like, you need to be able to access Twitter.
Police have been doing this for years now. It’s a fast a cheap way to microblog without buying or supporting something with the city’s budget.
Yup funds, and the web traffic handleability.
My small city (population 89,000) had a 911 outage about 2 years ago. Their solution was to sms text or voice dial everyone with the message "...please dial any county non-emergency number... see a list of numbers at bitly.url...". The hosted website was hugged-to-death.After fines, it was inevitably cheaper to extend the nearest net backbone closer to our neck of the woods and upgrade all county things with fiber and data centers.
Can't have those ticket funds going to digital infrastructure when you gotta get up armored trucks to deal with protesters.
"Stat tuned for an important Government Announcement!"
Deposit $1 to continue
Ferenginar
please drink your verification can and post your hourly "Musk is the best" post to continue
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.
Don't worry they spam everyone's cell phones with deafening alerts at 3am too.
Thankfully all but the shitty national ones can be turned off on most Android phones.
Yeah but government doing anything besides feeding corporate parasites is communism.
Can't have that... We should be paying Twitter a service fee for them allowing our government to communicate to peasants.
The government uses EAS and WEA to disseminate alerts. Both are government-operated systems that are not controlled, manipulated, lost, or disconnected by third parties. The AMBER alert in question was delivered via both EAS and WEA.
The Xhitter avenue (along with every other major social media platform) is what they refer to as a "secondary distributor".
I had no idea this shit depended on twitter!?!? what a bunch of bullshit. Even though I usually ignore amber alerts they should at the very least be as accessible as possible for people who help.
they should at the very least be as accessible as possible for people who help.
They've been doing this for as long as I can remember, the link in the amber alert led to a Twitter post that anyone could view. It wasn't until musk recently making it so you have to make an account in order to see posts which makes me surprised this hasn't been brought up sooner
Former HI Governor Ige could not recall a false missile attack alert because he didnt know his Xitter password.
Did Elon Musk Rape and Dismember a 14 Year Old Girl?
People are saying it. Many great people.
He definitely didn't do that in 1990, a lot of people are saying that was Glenn beck.
It's an older meme but it checks out.
Unfortunately I hit a screen preventing me from seeing the article unless I signed in.
I got you.
"Earlier this week, the California Highway Patrol sent an Amber Alert push notification to phones in the Los Angeles area about a 14-year-old girl that authorities believed had been abducted. But instead of conveying vital information that could help locate the victim within the notification itself, the law enforcement agency linked to a post from its official X account, a practice it adopted six years ago. But this time, many people reported they could not view the alert because they hit a screen that prevents users from seeing any content on X until they sign in to their account.
The California Highway Patrol told WIRED it was aware of the issue and had reached out to X for more information. “We’re looking into it,” Sergeant Dan Keane said. X did not respond to a request for comment.
Amber Alerts are issued by local law enforcement agencies to help locate children who are believed to have been abducted and are at risk of dying or serious injury. In California, the California Highway Patrol’s Emergency Notification and Tactical Alert Center is tasked with issuing the alerts. The law enforcement agency told WIRED it has used X (formerly Twitter) to push out the notifications since 2018 without any problems, at least until this incident.
On other social platforms, including Reddit, Threads, and Bluesky, local California residents vented their frustrations about being unable to receive the details of an emergency happening in their community. “This should be illegal and everyone should be upset about this. If that alert was for my child and tons of people couldn’t see it because they don’t have a stupid X account, I would be beyond infuriated,” one person wrote on Reddit. “Why the fuck should a social media platform benefit from people wanting to be good citizens and informed about missing kids?” another asked on Threads.
Some users reported they didn’t need to log in to see the California Highway Patrol’s X post, which was sent via a URL created using the Bitly link shortener service. It’s unclear what percentage of people who received the push notification were able to view the information about the missing girl and what percentage hit X’s log-in gate. Overall, only 21 percent of US adults say they ever use X, according to the Pew Research Center, not all of whom may have the app installed on their phones.
After Elon Musk took over Twitter more than two years ago, the billionaire rapidly laid off the majority of the social media site’s existing employees and instituted sweeping changes to its moderation and verification policies. The shifts spurred concerns that Twitter would become less reliable for emergency communications. The incident this week in California suggests at least some of these fears were founded.
“Requiring a login creates accessibility challenges and raises concerns about digital equity. Everyone should be able to access life-critical information, regardless of whether they use a specific platform,” says Amanda Lee Hughes, a professor of computer science at Brigham Young University who has studied digital emergency communications tools.
People in Missouri reported encountering a similar issue in July 2023, when the Missouri Highway Patrol sent out an Amber Alert push notification with a link to an X post. Local residents similarly spoke out about how they could not see the alert unless they logged on to the platform. “It was quite a change” from how the alerts used to work, says Missouri Highway Patrol lieutenant Eric Brown, who works in the public information and education department.
But the incident ultimately didn’t prompt the Missouri Highway Patrol to abandon X as its go-to platform for Amber Alert push notifications. According to Brown, when X verified the law enforcement agency's account as an official government entity, the log-in issue problem went away, and the public could once again access its posts.
Several of the California Highway Patrol’s official X accounts have the same verification badge as the Missouri Highway Patrol, including the one devoted specifically to disseminating active alerts statewide. However, not all of the California agency’s accounts appear to be verified, including what looks like the official channel for the CHP’s Southern Division, which includes Los Angeles county.
When it was known as Twitter, X was widely viewed as an essential part of global disaster and emergency communications infrastructure. Government officials and agencies around the world relied on the service as a way to broadcast information about hurricanes, mass shootings, and other crises. Before Musk took over the platform in 2022, anyone could view public tweets in their browser regardless of whether they had an account on the site or had installed Twitter’s mobile app. (In 2015, the company reported that more than 500 million people visited Twitter’s site per month without logging in.)
In June 2023, reports that X had started locking content behind a log-in screen began popping up online. At the time, Musk called the move a “temporary emergency measure” that was put in place because X was “getting data pillaged so much it was degrading the service.” It’s unclear exactly what Musk was referring to, but that same month he expressed concerns about AI companies like OpenAI allegedly scraping Twitter posts without prior authorization.
It now looks like the decision to turn X into a more closed platform stuck. According to tests conducted this week, X has continued to limit what people without accounts can see. WIRED looked at several of its staff reporters’ X accounts without logging in, for example, and was only able to view a sampling of their popular posts rather than a comprehensive chronological feed. It does appear that accounts run by government entities are not restricted in this way; all of the posts shared by the California Highway Patrol’s alerts account can be viewed without logging in.
Aside from allowing anyone to view content shared on the platform, another way Twitter previously helped emergency communicators was by giving them free access to its API, which Musk later revoked. That allowed organizations like the US National Tsunami Warning Center to send automatic alerts about potentially deadly natural disasters. Researchers and first responders could also use the API to monitor activity across Twitter and “extract key insights, such as identifying risk hot spots or combating misinformation,” says Hughes. “The platform’s role has shifted as policies and public usage evolve, so its effectiveness today may look quite different.”
Despite these drawbacks, X still remains an important platform for relaying information during emergency situations. In October, several government information officers emergency told PRWeek they planned to continue posting updates on X despite its diminished usefulness, because they had amassed large followings on the site and their priority ultimately remains ensuring that accurate information reaches as many people as possible. But the incident in California this week highlights how government agencies can run into problems when third-party services once considered reliable later change their policies in an unpredictable ways."
Just text the info to people.
Was just about to post that as well, yep. The irony.
Can someone with more than 7 followers just respond with this screenshot to their social... love to see the response.
If you think Twitter is ever going to give you real news again, you deserve to have your face eaten by leopards.
In Switzerland there is an app called Alertswiss which gets published by the government. They use it for critical alerts and you can also use it to see open warnings and where in the country there might be stuff happening.
Just do the same @California
Not that I do not agree, but if you think you'll be able to get Americans, who already do not trust the government, to download an app on their phones made by the government, well I have a bridge to sell you.
That's because conservatives are pedophiles who sex-traffic children.
If we're going by outcomes alone, it seems very likely.
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.
That’s because Elon Musk works with the pedophile elites. He can’t have people knowing the truth.
I sincerely doubt this was anything targeted at Amber Alerts specifically.
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.
RSS is as old as the internet but it's been effectively killed, except for the websites that host it accidentally. Our city and The Orange House has one but it's only limited information posted there.
Elon Musk hates Americans, pass it on.
They won't believe it if he tells us that himself...
Tell the lie often enough...
Claim Elon's an enemy of Trump if that's what it takes for the dog to bite.
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.
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.
Check out this guy and his research if you haven't already. Confirms what you describe, with some rally alarming numbers and data to back it up
I think a good first step would be to require all public services and similar to transition to FOSS software only. Schools, governments, public health, etc, should not, generally speaking, be in the business of making money for private interests, nor should our data be stored in these black boxes. If we don't own it; it owns us. Sure that's a huge departure from current reality, but I see it as fairly clear cut. I'm sure people will say I go too far.
The federal government does or at least did have a decent in-house open source dev team (legally, work done by the us government has a copyright which belongs to the people, making it roughly open source). The us government is also filled with people who believe that any failure to extract profit is a failure at life, so the government also outsources a bunch of work to priv companies which do retain their copyrights, but it's not required.
All shitstain muskrat's shrieking 'Pedo' at anyone critical of him really feels like projection in this context.
As most things do when it comes to the exceptionally primitive conservative reptile-brain.
I mean the guy even supports Gaetz after the investigation shows that he has sex with an underage girl for money.... And was friends with Epstein and company..
He's trying to dilute the accusations surrounding himself likely by just falsely a claiming others are involved in things he was.
Paywall.
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.
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.
Paragraph one: agreed, Elon musk loves sex offenders and probably is one. Love this paragraph.
Paragraph two jumped the shark.
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.
It's not just Xitter and Facebook, it's just most private social sites these days. IG, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, etc. They want to know who you are and what you're doing, because that's how they make money.
Wait until you install JShelter and Cloudflare refuse access
People complain about being annoyed by amber alerts on their phones anyway
Complaining about a loud irrelevant thing is different from not wanting it.
I don't X anyways. All notifications are blocked.
You would have gotten this one, because it was a Wireless Emergency Alert, not a Xhitter notification.
Bro. Just use SMS for that stuff.