However, Katz later posted on X: “Israel cannot allow the Hezbollah terror organization to continue attacking its territory and citizens, and soon we will make the necessary decisions. The free world must unconditionally stand with Israel in its war against the axis of evil led by Iran and extremist Islam.”
It’s been years and I’m still not over the weirdness of governments announcing major positions via Twitter.
As bad as it was to begin with, it should have stopped when Musk bought the platform.
Really though, there’s simply no excuse for governments to announce things primarily (or even solely) via platforms that can control that information for their own interests. I doubt the interest of Elon Musk and the interests of Canada align on all subjects.
I don’t have a problem with Elon Musk as a person or him owning it – I wasn’t on the Elon hype train back when the progressive crowd was glamorizing him, and I’m not on the Elon-bashing train now that he’s making conservative statements and is unpopular with the progressive crowd. My problem is with the platform itself.
Message length
The thing doesn’t have the degree of message length limitation that it used to, but it’s still really short. Being concise is one thing, but this is at the level that it affects the format of the message.
Informality
Maybe it’s just me, but Twitter seems just intrinsically informal. There is virtually no form of communication that has traditionally been more-formal than state communications.
Security
This is the big one.
It really boggles my mind that a state would grant Twitter the status of being the medium for their announcements.
How secure is Twitter? I mean, I’m sure that Twitter’s engineers try to keep in secure, but I don’t believe that they have the kind of emphasis on security that, say, the people who are on TLS (which would secure a state website) do. What happens if someone compromises a state Twitter account, sends out a bogus message, and then manages to cut access off to the account for a period of time? At just the right time, like coups or something, that could have an enormous impact.
Twitter is a private company. Their responsibilities are not the same as a national government’s. Yes, they care about their reputation, and there are bounds on what they’ll do. But they were willing to cut off Trump. I can very much believe that under the right circumstances, they’d be willing to cut off officials or governments abroad. And it wouldn’t even be sanctions-level stuff, where it’s an extraordinary act – like, they can put together whatever ToS stuff they want, block people all the time. If I’m a government, I absolutely do not want Twitter to be able to cut off my communications. I don’t want whatever governments might be able to exert pressure on Twitter – and I guarantee that in a serious-enough situation, many would be willing to try – to induce that the communications be cut off. There are Twitter offices around the world. What happens if there’s a war on and some Twitter employees are taken hostage? Is the CEO going to say “let them die, keep the communications open”? Where are his obligations going to lie?
How vetted are the employees who have access to various levels of administrative access at Twitter? I would bet that there is a larger pool and that there is less vetting than the kind of people who have access to set operations at say, certificate authority operators or to cut international cable access at major ISPs, which collectively is comparable to the kind of control that an individual – who may-or-may-not be acting in line with the company’s aims as a whole – might have.
I strongly suspect that there are ways to manipulate Twitter, given sufficient use of bot accounts, to make material from malicious accounts be ranked highly. I’ve seen disinfo campaigns in the past. This is a problem that search engines share, but Twitter does real-time indexing of all content and I strongly suspect is a lot easier to induce wild ranking changes on.
It’s been years and I’m still not over the weirdness of governments announcing major positions via Twitter.
As bad as it was to begin with, it should have stopped when Musk bought the platform.
Really though, there’s simply no excuse for governments to announce things primarily (or even solely) via platforms that can control that information for their own interests. I doubt the interest of Elon Musk and the interests of Canada align on all subjects.
I don’t have a problem with Elon Musk as a person or him owning it – I wasn’t on the Elon hype train back when the progressive crowd was glamorizing him, and I’m not on the Elon-bashing train now that he’s making conservative statements and is unpopular with the progressive crowd. My problem is with the platform itself.
Message length
The thing doesn’t have the degree of message length limitation that it used to, but it’s still really short. Being concise is one thing, but this is at the level that it affects the format of the message.
Informality
Maybe it’s just me, but Twitter seems just intrinsically informal. There is virtually no form of communication that has traditionally been more-formal than state communications.
Security
This is the big one.
It really boggles my mind that a state would grant Twitter the status of being the medium for their announcements.
How secure is Twitter? I mean, I’m sure that Twitter’s engineers try to keep in secure, but I don’t believe that they have the kind of emphasis on security that, say, the people who are on TLS (which would secure a state website) do. What happens if someone compromises a state Twitter account, sends out a bogus message, and then manages to cut access off to the account for a period of time? At just the right time, like coups or something, that could have an enormous impact.
Twitter is a private company. Their responsibilities are not the same as a national government’s. Yes, they care about their reputation, and there are bounds on what they’ll do. But they were willing to cut off Trump. I can very much believe that under the right circumstances, they’d be willing to cut off officials or governments abroad. And it wouldn’t even be sanctions-level stuff, where it’s an extraordinary act – like, they can put together whatever ToS stuff they want, block people all the time. If I’m a government, I absolutely do not want Twitter to be able to cut off my communications. I don’t want whatever governments might be able to exert pressure on Twitter – and I guarantee that in a serious-enough situation, many would be willing to try – to induce that the communications be cut off. There are Twitter offices around the world. What happens if there’s a war on and some Twitter employees are taken hostage? Is the CEO going to say “let them die, keep the communications open”? Where are his obligations going to lie?
How vetted are the employees who have access to various levels of administrative access at Twitter? I would bet that there is a larger pool and that there is less vetting than the kind of people who have access to set operations at say, certificate authority operators or to cut international cable access at major ISPs, which collectively is comparable to the kind of control that an individual – who may-or-may-not be acting in line with the company’s aims as a whole – might have.
I strongly suspect that there are ways to manipulate Twitter, given sufficient use of bot accounts, to make material from malicious accounts be ranked highly. I’ve seen disinfo campaigns in the past. This is a problem that search engines share, but Twitter does real-time indexing of all content and I strongly suspect is a lot easier to induce wild ranking changes on.