NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says it is “assessing its options” regarding Twitter use after the social media site announced it would reverse a policy charging public agencies for automated warning such as transit status updates.
The MTA said last week that it had stopped using Twitter for status updates because “the reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed,” but the New York Times reported the new policies would cost agency about $50,000 per month [see “New York MTA quits using Twitter …,” Trains News Wire, May 1, 2023].
A Twitter post Wednesday said the microblogging site that verified government or publicly owned services who tweet weather alerts, transport updates and emergency notifications will be able to use the application programming interface, or API, for free.
This led the MTA to post that it was “glad Twitter got the message” and it was considering its options.
The Washington Post reports that organizations such as the National Weather Service also welcomed the news. Under the prior policy, the Weather Service had expected to be limited to 50 free tweets and had warned that some weather alerts might not be posted.
But it also reports other organizations were not sure if they were covered by the exception. Twitter, which has laid off its media relations staff, did not respond to Post inquiries.
Really, would anyone miss Twitter if it just went away?
Twitter has ceased to be a medium of sane, thoughtful and respectful conversation, and should disappear, or at least be ignored by most of us. However Twitter also serves a very useful role for short, one way communication for many pubic and private agencies. and that type of service should be continued in some form or other (maybe by a twitter spinoff that handles only one-directional traffic)
Was it ever?
You could the say the same thing about “social media” in general. A lot of unsocial activity is posted.
My simple rule of thumb about posting, is if it you would say it to all of your “friends” in person (assuming you could gather them all together at once), then post it. Otherwise, edit it, until you can, or do not post it.
Smartest move would be for these organizations to NOT even reconsider using the platform…just drop it entirely until Musk gets it through his fat head that he doesn’t know everything and either takes a huge loss as he has to file for bankruptcy or the service just delves into uselessness.
Worthless Twitter cost Musk $44B’s. Berkshire Hathaway paid I don’t recall either $42B’s or $44B’s to buy BNSF.
Musk might just as well have bought crypto from Sam Bankman-Fried.