Technology

They have one, but you also want information to be where people are. Especially if where people are is full of misinformation and rumours.

Japan has various earthquake notification systems. Tweets are just one more way to get the information to the people on a platform they use.

Create your own emergency notification system!

Those never turn out well.

Running their own mastodon instance should be viable though.

Cell phones already have the emergency alert system they could just use that.

Remember when just about every government employee was carrying around a BlackBerry device for official business?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Or any other service, that like Twitter, is a closed for profit service of a multinational for profit corporations.

There are government text messages and local websites and all sorts of ways of reaching people. Unfortunately, X probably reaches ten times as many people. I think a diversified approach makes sense.

That being said, us gov has sent the text messages and that seems to be the best way to do it. Everyone has a phone. And if you don't, then you like to live on the edge.

It was a good way to offload responsibility for something actually working.

With social media the unreliability card has been played (by us, asocial nerds, killjoys and neckbeards) and beaten (by them, normal sane social successful people) 10+ years ago, so even when it's a serious role being discussed, that card can't be played again.

They do, all phones get an emergency alert and tvs display a message. Twitter was another vector to spread the word out.

It definitely makes headlines worse anyway

I just call it twitter because I like dead-naming it.

It's probably one of numerous ways they try and reach people. Wouldn't be surprised if they have it set up to spam alerts out through various mechanisms including social media. It's just that one platform is now complete dogshit. Maybe this failure will hasten Twitter's decline in Japan.

Why not? Wouldn’t you want information going out on every available service? They likely have info going out on Facebook as well.

That’s a bot account BTW. There’s a flag next to the name to indicate that but I guess it’s not visible on mastodon.

I read the title. Had some thoughts and opinions. After reading the article, the thoughts and opinions remain the same.

The article lists prices for next level api requests but it's 5000 dollars compared to the 100 that the non profit is already paying. They encouraged users to download their app to receive potentially life saving alerts.

I summed up the article in three sentences.

Doesn't help if people don't use it.
That said, they should definitely stop using the thing formerly known as Twitter.
Use news outlets, public radio and TV and SMS alerts, those are "correct" ways of handling such situations, social media is not.

Which they already have

https://unnerv.jp/@UN_NERV

well the Japanese Liberal Party has exclusively ruled Japan since WWII, and it might as well be considered a one party authoritarian state with a facade of democratic legitimacy. But yes, not strictly speaking fascist.