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by thepasswordis 1074 days ago
>Oh my goodness the people are dependant on this essential service to find out information about some ongoing wildfires and it isn't working!! Is there anything we could do?

>Well you could pay you $8 hosting bill?

>Anything, anything at all we could do?

>Pay the hosting bill. It's $8

>My god man, why is Elon Musk doing this to us?!? Is there any way to get this to stop?

>Well we could pay the bill, which is $8.

>We are completely helpless in this situation. Let's complain about it on twitter!
3 comments
zuminator 1074 days ago
There are two reasons here why "just pay the shakedown" isn't a compelling argument.

The first one is obvious. Why should public institutions (or anybody) preferentially line Musk's pockets, especially when every other social media site is free?

The second is more subtle. The goal of this type of social media outreach by government is to make sure the messaging reaches as many people as possible. But Twitter, by instituting these restrictions, also limits the amount of people who can read these essential messages. So even if the government pays, its tweets reach fewer people than before. And thereby the government indirectly discriminates against people too poor to pay the fee.

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thepasswordis 1074 days ago
Because nobody uses those other social media sites.

Why should our governments line the pockets of verizon, cogent, L3, AT&T, when they could just broadcast the messages on a hacked together lorawan chat handheld that my friends and I use to talk to each other at burning man?

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zuminator 1074 days ago
> Because nobody uses those other social media sites.

You realize Twitter isn't even in the top 10 social media platforms worldwide. Facebook has almost 6x as many users.

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thepasswordis 1074 days ago
I think this is their facebook account. It's login-gated: https://www.facebook.com/TranBC/
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mynameisvlad 1074 days ago
$8 for individuals. The BC Government is not an individual.

I’m sure snarkily repeating the same thing will change that fact, though, so keep it up!

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dragonwriter 1074 days ago
@DriveBC is already a verified government account, what are you talking about $8 for?

Also, the “temporary” tweet limits are supposedly an anti-scraping, not anti-people-not-paying-for-Blue, measure.

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