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Comment by ibejoeb | Hacker News Reader

I have questions:

1. Does Twitter even know about this?

2. Did the transportation minister bring this to Twitter? I mean, if it's such a big deal, is it worth a ring, email, or DM?

3. Did Twitter refuse to uncap it?

I don't know if the reporting is sloppy, or if there is an agenda, or whatever, but there are acknowledgements by the government that they were lazily relying on Twitter without any kind of formal arrangement.

If I'm handling comms for the ministry, I would go to twitter with a public weal request that it designates critical information accounts with no practical rate limits and that are visible to all without sign-in. They have the capability. Someone needs to initiate it.

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> Lazily relying on Twitter

I don't think that every government ministry or important figure should be expected to have to proactively reach out to Twitter and make a "formal arrangement" to avoid being rate limited on one of the world's primary sources of real-time information. This is simply a bad standard to set. Nevermind that, the rate limits were implemented a week ago so calling it lazy to not have a "formal arrangement" in place in less than a week is silly, especially considering that Twitter support's response times right now are atrocious.

Counterpoint, if a government is relying on a novelty microblog website for apparently important infrastructure, the website should probably be informed of this.

1. Twitter has existed since 2006, I'm sure they are very well aware of governments utilizing their platform since then.

2. How do you expect governments to provide information? Should they:

a. Distribute information via the most widely consumed forms of media

b. Create individual platforms so that people have to check a unique website to stay upddated on each government ministry

3. Twitter may be a "novelty microblog website" in a global sense, but in North America calling it that is absurd.

I don't know what happened. There's no information in the article other than a government rep saying that they're relying on private infrastructure as if it were public. I would like answers to those questions. I'm suggesting that the government should make an attempt to solve a problem, if it's actually a problem.

Twitter isn't obligated to provide services to the state, but maybe if there was a little diplomacy, there could be a reasonable arrangement. Twitter certainly does not have to crawl all accounts and determine which ones are emergency services.

I don't care one way or another. I'm highlighting the information gap and explaining what I think should be done.

I mean if the account was not verified, how would Twitter know that it really is the government and not some guy who is squatting the handle ?

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