Rate Limits & Public Sector Communications
How does Twitter's new tiered rate limit affect public sector comms? There are a few ways, and as always, context is key. As someone who works directly with public sector teams, I see this as a major problem.?
During times of emergency, people use various communication apps & methods to stay informed and in touch. But in situations like a wildfire or earthquake, image & video based apps may not load, and cell towers can and will be affected, making lighter apps like Twitter extremely helpful. Even in non-emergency situations, a large enough school event can easily put a local website under stress with parents and teachers trying to load it at the same time.?
This reality has led many in the world of public comms to build Twitter and other social media into regular plans for keeping the public updated on evacuations, emergency situations, and preparedness. In fact it works so well that Twitter generally is used in standard communications. This fact is important as the online world moves more and more sideways into weird, fake, and generally untrustworthy stories spiraling out of control, seemingly out of the blue. People know that even after the death of accountable verification, Twitter accounts from public organizations are generally trustworthy and worth listening to. But with rate limits in place, there is now a likelihood that you may not be able to access credible and important messages.?
We are now in a situation where we are accustomed to up-to-date publicly accessible information from trustworthy sources online, but we may hit our arbitrary rate limit before important messages come through to us. This will signal a change in behaviour from us and from publishers who need to keep people informed. That change will happen in the next few weeks, but right now look at this major piece of infrastructure just withering in public in the name of shareholder value. The owners of Twitter couldn't turn down the sale due to fiduciary responsibility, and now what could be a global public good is less valuable than a set of linked group chats.?
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What is needed for responsible public sector communications:
This is all happening right at a time when local news in Canada is under extreme duress, and rather than support efforts to build local news infrastructure, by funding the reporting, editing, fact checking, and distribution that make local news a credible, accountable force for good, major platforms are threatening to remove news content. Despite commitments to fighting misinformation, Meta and Google are choosing to simply remove the articles that exist only due to the communications infrastructure that make their platforms worth visiting.
With Twitter undergoing major changes with little preparation or announcements, and limits on what will or won't even get published or be viewable on Google and Meta sites, credible public sector communications are going to need a stable, broad, and hyper-local strategy to keep the public informed and to continue their promise to fight misinformation and disinformation.
Instagram Threads is set to launch this Thursday to take advantage of Twitter's disarray. Will it be public, fast, and accessible? We won't know all the details until it launches, but it will be another mass communications company with a global footprint owned by a corporation based in one country, accountable to one shareholder with the largest ownership stake. At some point we're going to need to figure out mass communication in terms of public goods, public digital infrastructure including accountability, and a path away from the whims of individuals.