I can, but it would still be effective for public announcements because Mastodon does not typically require a login to view on the web, and it provides am RSS feed. Walled garden platforms that won't show posts to anonymous web visitors are not acceptable for public announcements.
Yeh, I can't believe an emergency service (which I would consider a government agency) is using a URL shortener.
No wonder scammers also use URL shorteners. People get desensitized to what they are doing, masking the actual URL
The dumb thing is they can fit quite a bit of text in the alert itself. They don't need to link to anything to provide the relevant info necessary to spot potential suspects or the description of the child.
Every time I've gotten an Amber Alert on my phone, the phone screams the description of the kid & the suspected car & possibly the suspect themselves on top of showing the entire message on the screen. No idea why anywhere would put all of that info onto Twitter only when this system already exists & really grabs your attention.
Yah, I've been yelling loudly about this shit for a decade. Nobody cares, especially not the people in the government who can't be bothered to use their own websites.
This kind of crap, and the fact that I can't force the sounds to respect DND in my country, are why I turned off Amber Alerts on my phone through adb (or "hacking", to the layperson).
I have that setting, but it doesn't work in my country.
For some stupid reason, they've decided to send every time of warning message at the "Presidential Level" that's supposed to be reserved for crazy life or death kind of stuff.
The settings are in my phone, but can't actually do anything to the messages coming in.
So I disabled the entire system from my phone and downloaded an app that gives me alerts. Now I'm getting weather alerts again. Haven't had the opportunity to test whether it'll alert me to emergencies yet, thankfully. But I've turned off Amber Alerts in the app.
Jeez! I had one in MI a few months ago where the image of the abductee was a Bookface link you couldn't view unless you were signed in. Just ridiculous.
Now I understand. I was confused about why people were going to Xhitter for Amber alerts. Looks like California is the issue for pointing people there in the Amber alert that goes out to phones.
The specifics vary a bit from one state to another but AMBER Alerts are normally reserved for abducted children, usually with some additional requirements like sufficient reason to think the child is in immediate danger of death or injury, and enough of a description of the child and/or the abductor to be able to identify them.
Kbin is federated with several lemmy instances and it's the source of most content with community focused microblogging in the fediverse. The post you're commenting on was posted directly to LW.