An article in The Atlantic takes aim at the changes that Elon Musk is making at Twitter, arguing that the platform is becoming less useful for the emergency management and disaster response professionals that use it. “Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data,” writes Juliette Kayyem, the faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and the author of The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. “The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.”
Kayyem points to the timely manner of tweets and Twitter’s own encouragement of the disaster management industry to use its technology as reasons for its wholesale adoption, and that the changes at Twitter, such as removing free API access for developers, has real consequences (the decision is now in limbo). In addition, the ease of purchasing verified blue checkmarks makes the path to creating spoof accounts for agencies of importance, such as The National Weather Service, that much simpler for malicious actors.
“A public-safety apparatus came to rely on a platform that actively courted such reliance,” writes Kayyem. “The harm from Twitter’s recent changes may not be measurable in dollars, but it is nevertheless real harm.”
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