Kate Knibbs writing for Wired: Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old

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.

I believe it’s a good thing to meet your constituents where they are, and it likely made sense for the California Highway Patrol to do this for many years. However, it is very bad for them to put essential information on a private website they don’t own and that blocks access from logged out users. Some users said they were able to see the post without logging in, but zero logged out users would see a thread, since for a year or so X has only shown one post at a time to logged-out visitors.

This is why it’s important for people to own their presence on the web, especially when it comes to government agencies that need to communicate with people. It goes beyond this situation, of course. What if X decided to block their account? What if the X algorithm decided that posts like this were bummers and didn’t drive the engagement they want, so amber alerts would get buried in the feed?

The answer isn’t necessarily to start their own Mastodon server, but that absolutely could be the answer and it would be more accessible and reliable than posting to X. They’d still give people a feed they could follow on Mastodon, Threads, or many other ActivityPub services, and they could know that anyone with a link to their post could get to it because Mastodon lets users choose who can see their posts, not the multi-billion dollar tech company. Maybe they don’t want to deal with spinning up a server for this sort of thing, and that’s fine as well, but at least post this info to your own website.

The important thing for the California Highway Patrol is that in the alert that goes out to to people, the link to get more information needs to be on a site that they control and that anyone with an internet connection can access, whether they have an account on that site or not.

As ever, X is allowed to generally do what they want, that’s their right as a private company who runs a non-monopolistic business, but it’s yet another reason that others should not rely on them to be any sort of “public square.”