Emergency preparedness experts and professionals wisely warn of peril if the unique attributes of Twitter in tracking and responding to unfolding calamities are lost
Nov 18, 2022·edited Nov 18, 2022Liked by Andy @Revkin
I have resisted Twitter, have hardly ever looked at it, & won’t really care if it vanishes. But you have reminded me that when there are wildfires near my home, that’s where I get my info, from the county sheriff’s tweets.
"If Twitter suddenly stops working or if huge swaths of the population can't access it during a crisis, the result will almost certainly be preventable suffering & death." > Seriously? "Huge swaths of the population" don't even have a Twitter account, anywhere in the world. The total user base is 5% of the population of the world. There are dozens of other ways to disseminate emergency information > it was disseminated even before Twitter was dreamed up. Sure, in the meantime we have actively dismantled public services that did just that, because, well, a dysfunctional privately-owned toxic platform is surely better.
I have resisted Twitter, have hardly ever looked at it, & won’t really care if it vanishes. But you have reminded me that when there are wildfires near my home, that’s where I get my info, from the county sheriff’s tweets.
"If Twitter suddenly stops working or if huge swaths of the population can't access it during a crisis, the result will almost certainly be preventable suffering & death." > Seriously? "Huge swaths of the population" don't even have a Twitter account, anywhere in the world. The total user base is 5% of the population of the world. There are dozens of other ways to disseminate emergency information > it was disseminated even before Twitter was dreamed up. Sure, in the meantime we have actively dismantled public services that did just that, because, well, a dysfunctional privately-owned toxic platform is surely better.
I’m thinking it would not be a big loss!