[Eji1700]

We really really really need some legislation about governmental agencies using privately owned companies to announce things.

There was already some for radio/early news, but the landscape has changed so much, and it bothers me a ton that these platforms are being used.

[quickthrower2]

The legislation could be "just don't" because:

1. The government owns it's own top level domain(s) to be a primary source

and

2. There is the general media who can turn that into stories, and use whatever private companies they need.

This delineates official statement from general news, which people will be slightly more skeptical of.

[dragonwriter]

> We really really really need some legislation about governmental agencies using privately owned companies to announce things.

What kind of legislation? There's a whole lot of existing law that applies in that domain (both statute and Constitutional case law), but if you think we need different laws, it probably helps to at least present the general shape of the law you want rather than just that it should in some way touch impact government using private platforms for announcements.

[ChainOfFools]

An example might be that the government sets up its own very basic one-way tweet-like notification service, something as simple as or simpler than an RSS feed, with the official content accessible directly via a .gov hosted web page.

Whatever X is or becomes, as owned by private interests, is trusted with nothing more than scraping and rebroadcasting the original and authentic source.

A solution with less developer and user overhead ma ybe that government webs host a list of public keys by which any "gray or blue check mark" type of authenticatuon signal capability on any private service can be validated against, and the government can revoke keys at any time if for some reason there's a suspicion that a counterfeit message is being distributed via these private services. Maybe repurpose the creaky old atomic clock time sync radio signal that is deployed almost everywhere as a means to distribute a rotating secondary factor. just old PKI tactics proven to work for two plus decades.

But this approach is still open to exploiting human tendency to trust things that have been trustworthy for a long time, until they aren't. So I still think hosting official messaging feeds directly from a government run server, accessible by any barebones http client capable of displaying plain text with basic paragraph/item formatting at most, is the gold standard.

The current situation, where X or meta or google or even a mastodon instance is entrusted with the entire conduit from human input to broadcast output, is a terrible precedent to normalize.

[ndriscoll]

It looks like all of their tweets are just links to items on the news room portion of their website. If you click around a little there, you'll see that they do have RSS feeds:

https://www.sec.gov/page/news

https://www.sec.gov/about/sec-rss

So it looks like they're already doing exactly what you suggest: they post official announcements on their website which you can subscribe to using the standard way to do that (RSS), and they also rebroadcast on Twitter by linking back to the original source. What should they be doing differently? Periodically tweet reminders that you can subscribe directly to their RSS feeds? Stop posting to Twitter at all and leave only a message that you can find official news on their website?

[chankstein38]

Your ideas are honestly great and both of the solutions you presented (RSS->.gov site and public keys) feel like great solutions. I think the problem is that both of those require the general public to have some amount of technical knowledge which is, apparently, a big ask. The first would be a lot easier to present and avoid confusion but it'd still require people to know to go to that site.

For what it's worth though, I think the solution to that is people should have some real amount of education about the function and potential dangers of the internet before getting on it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> both of those require the general public to have some amount of technical knowledge

Twitter and Instagram could repost the government feeds.

[Eji1700]

Well we had this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/trump-twitter...

(full opinion here): https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1365-trump-twitter-s...

which while resolved, really opens more questions than it solves (which is fine because legislating from the bench shouldn't be the norm...)

There need to be very clear laws about how social media and modern tech is used to present information. Hell for the first time the government should have the ability to directly release information and not be reliant on normal privately owned distribution, and that should be investigated as well.

This whole thing is a giant can of legal worms anyways, and it only gets worse because our legislative branch has decided to devolve into high school popularity contests and just let the judiciary sort it all out.

[dragonwriter]

> There need to be very clear laws about how social media and modern tech is used to present information.

What laws? “There should be laws about X” is a bunch of words with no substance unless you can say what the laws should, at least in general terms, require and/or prohibit.

> Hell for the first time the government should have the ability to directly release information and not be reliant on normal privately owned distribution

The government is able to do so, and has done for... quite a long time, though until recently wide distribution was a problem. Now, you can get information directly from the websites of most government agencies.

They also release information via private conventional media (via several mechanisms) and social media (via government run accounts), but they aren't exclusively reliant on such media.

[paxys]

The government has always used privately owned companies (newspapers, news channels, news websites) to make announcements. Social media is just the latest iteration of that. The government operating its own websites is in fact the aberration, and I'd wager the vast majority of people don't even know they exist or visit them. So not sure what such a law would accomplish.

[Eji1700]

I'm aware which is why I mentioned that.

The big issue is you can't be banned from newspapers, radio, and news channels. And there was still some question about "can you just announce this on the news or is that going to be unfair to people who don't own TV's". You can absolutely be banned from twitter.

There's also the standard of keeping records. The government is supposed to have immaculate records of these sorts of things with a whole shitload of legal nonsense involved in it. Twitter has complied with this under recent presidents but it's a big question of "do they need to?" and "what happens if they don't?".

For starters it like violates the FOIA, which is a serious thing.

[riffic]

there's prior art for a government gazette (the federal register or whatever equivalent in your own country):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette

going back even further in time you had the town crier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_crier

[lotsofpulp]

At the very least, there should always be the original release of the information on the official government website.

[riffic]

tell your congress critters to write laws requiring public infrastructure (public sector adoption of ActivityPub is an awesome use-case here)

[quickthrower2]

All you need is HTTPs and HTML. Maybe RSS.

[riffic]

even more importantly you need people. Servers help too but fundamentally this speaks to a people problem.

[frostix]

I think we just need media literacy at least for now while the noise is still manageable. It’s perfectly fine to rely on private news to spread the information IMO, the issue is that people should independently verify said information.

After reading said announcement on Twitter, the first thing I’d do (if I cared about it) would be to head on over to sec.gov or use a search engine to find the official SEC site, then from navigate to find the official announcement. Any reputable news source should include a link in their announcement to the official announcement to save you this verification step.

At some point there may be so much targeted disinformation/misinformation out there that we need legislation to help protect against it but I don’t think we’re there yet.