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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

It always baffled me that so many governments relied on a private solution that only has 5% of the world population as users (Twitter) as the preferred mode of communication with their citizens.

It's good to see a solution made by the government instead.

The next step is to make it mandatory for officials to use this platform (and Twitter or Facebook in addition if they want to, I don't care) for all their official communication.

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Why replace press releases and web pages with a social microblog? "Official communication" sounds like something better handled in long-form reports than short notes jotted out into a social maelstrom of hot takes. Perhaps the next step might instead be to get government off social media altogether.

Yes I totally agree with that, but this is already an improvement over a non-official communication channel.

One is a pull-based system (official press releases, web pages), the other is a push-based announcement system. They can communicate the same messages but delivery is quite different.

Governments, in practice, tend to use Twitter as a sort of low latency press release system; the target audience is really journalists, and the tweets tend to link to longer-form things. Mastodon will do fine for that.

I don't use Twitter but seen numerous tweets cited in all the other media I consume.

Twitter is sort of backbone, fairly useless on it's own, but important for what it enables in wider context.

It's not much weirder that people use private Twitter than that people use private google.

I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about government officials.

The fact that the British PM will post information, in his official capacity, on Twitter that will not be posted on gov.uk is ridiculous and should be illegal.

It doesn't matter how many people are on twitter, because all the journalists are already there. They pick the official's tweets and turn it to news.

tbh I assume, naively, that organisations that post official things would post them via wire service and twitter at the same time.

You are right, it should be illegal, at the extremes it totally breaks down - "I announced it publicly" could legitimately be "I stood at the back door of Downing street and whispered it out loud".

I'm sure where he searches the web in offcial capacity he uses Google.

>that will not be posted on gov.uk

I agree it _should_ be posted on official websites.

Unfortunately we're racing to the bottom in how information is communicated and an app that delivers 10 second bits of nonsense is winning.

Do they rely on twitter? They use it, but almost every public organization has a website (wordpress). Twitter is a megaphone that they should use (like any other mass medium) to reach citizens

> It always baffled me that so many governments relied on a private solution

You can't exactly use tax payer money to develop an in-house solution

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