[mootzville]

Twitter...official government communications?

You would be better served accessing official government communications via .gov sites. This is their purpose.

If you want official bot communications from troll farms, then Twitter is the best!

[NikolaNovak]

Unfortunately that is not reality. Not even close, at least in my neck of the woods (Toronto, Canada)

Official government sites are largely static and slow to update.

Local emergency services, police, snow clearing, power and utility providers, etc all use Twitter for their most up to date posts anything else is hours or days behind if it gets updated at all.

I don't like that reality. I'd love to change that reality. I can not however wave it away :-/

[dijonman2]

Right or wrong Twitter has censored at least one government official. It will happen again. The platform has no integrity.

[ltfey]

I despise Donald Trump but I think this was a mistake. The failure of January 6 removed any short-term danger Trump presented, so there was no immediate need to ban the guy. At the same time, the use of a dodgy ban to censor an unpopular, failed public figure normalized the concept of private companies deplatforming people for political reasons--something they will use against the left more than the right, going forward--and also gave the world the sense of leftists and liberals (whom most of the country conflates) as cancelistas.

Social media is a huge liability for us on the left, as well as for society at large. Its structure and dynamics serve the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else, but it is associated with its public-facing apparent liberalism, which means that blowback against its failures and heavy-handed actions will diminish our reputation rather than the right's.

[logicalmonster]

> normalized the concept of private companies deplatforming people for political reasons

Maybe there's an earlier example I can't think of, but I don't think this trend started with Trump. I think this trend really started with Alex Jones. Once it becomes acceptable to ban anybody for ideas, then nobody can be considered safe from the chopping block. That was the freedom of speech test that civilization failed.

> the far-right, who are far more adept at using it than anyone else

What property of social media makes it so that people on the right are more skilled at using it?

And how can you tell the difference between "people on the right are more skilled at social media" and "better ideas simply win out"? Which one is true if they both explain reality?

[rst]

Lots of government agencies have "alert" twitter feeds which aren't as readily available on their own web sites; there certainly isn't an easy way to get a comparable aggregation of all of them.