this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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This is just a failure in government/governance.
There is literally an opportunity for every nation in the world to run it's own social media service as a hub for government services, alerts etc. If a couple of them did it open source it could be a world standard for government. Even now the wealthiest nations are scrambling to do something like this but it's too little, too late.
And even when they figure out software/process there's no government infrastructure that can compete with the private sector. Amazon in particular are a scary one to me - the amount of sensitive data governments around the world casually chuck into S3 is going to end very badly for a lot of people.
We need governments to get serious about digital infrastructure and security, in the same way they ensure food security, sanitation. Digital capability is just not negotiable anymore, it's vital.
Android & IOS have an emergency alert system that the government can use if they want to.
It doesn't have to be an entire service. It could be a Mastodon / Lemmy node under their own control, but they should still mirror the information to other social media platforms, perhaps with a link underneath pointing to their own server as source of truth.
This is quite frankly what all NGOs, news orgs and major companies should do - federate so they can moderate their own message. Seems bizarre to me that the BBC, or UN, or NATO or whatever wouldn't want to control their messaging this way. But realistically they do need to mirror the message out to other services.
Problem is there's no expertise in house. The Australian government is currently scrambling to build in-house expertise with regards to project management, technical insight and recruitment. They've been haemorrhaging cash just trying to do those basic things via external agencies, it's a shit show of wasted taxpayer dollars. And the contracts are only available to big firms whose owners went to school with whatever government is in power.. very cool system!
Chances are your government already releases info on its sites. When was the last time you looked?
I look frequently as I am a developer that works on government sites lol