“Everything my staff has put up has disappeared. Meetings, public hearings, bylaws, notices about water shut offs or road closures, anything we would post back to our main website has been removed.”
Coyne said the reason the posts were removed, according to Facebook, was because they went “against our Community Standards on cybersecurity.”
“It’s a struggle especially during the fire season here,” said Coyne. “It just makes it really, really frustrating because how do you post a PDF that says where the evacuations are, this is the map, this is the information you need to know, when those pieces of information keep disappearing from the social media channels that we use?”
It’s amazing how Facebook managed to be the AOL that AOL never quite got too.
Governments are slow to respond, but it’s hard to envision a future where they don’t all migrate to running their own Fediverse servers. It’s easy, especially if all you want to do is run a locked-down one and post info for dissemination, and you have total control (which gov’ts love). Easy to use, no platform lock-in, data is portable all over the place. The idea that our social infrastructure has become dependent on lunatic tech billionaires is nuts, and the sooner we can contribute to, but not depend on, those networks the better.
It’s easy until your municipal government says they need to pay an IT person to set it up and secure it, and then you hit the “asking for more budget” side of municipal governance.
This is why Twitter was popular, and why it must die.