People in Missouri reported encountering a similar problem in July 2023, when the Missouri Highway Patrol sent another Amber Alert push notification with a link to a post “It was a big change” from how the alerts used to work, says Missouri Highway Patrol Lt. Eric Brown, who works in the department of education and public information.
But the incident did not ultimately lead the Missouri Highway Patrol to abandon X as its go-to platform for Amber Alert push notifications. According to Brown, when X verified the law enforcement agency’s account as an official government entity, the login issue disappeared and the public could again “access our posts.”
Several of the California Highway Patrol’s official X accounts have the same verification badge as the Missouri Highway Patrol, including the one specifically dedicated to disseminating active alerts throughout the state. However, not all of the California agency’s accounts appear to be verified, including what it seems the official channel of the CHP Southern Division, which includes Los Angeles County.
When it was known as Twitter, X was widely seen as an essential part of the global emergency and disaster communications infrastructure. Government officials and agencies around the world relied on the service as a way to transmit information about hurricanes, mass shootings and other crises. Before Musk took over the platform in 2022, anyone could view public tweets in their browser, regardless of whether they had an account on the site or had the Twitter mobile app installed. (In 2015, the company reported that more than 500 million people visited the Twitter site per month without logging in).
In June 2023, reports that X had started blocking content behind a login screen began to appear online. At that moment, musk called The measure was a “temporary emergency measure” that was implemented because X was “being looted so much of data that it was degrading the service.” It’s unclear exactly what Musk was referring to, but the same month expressed concerns about artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI allegedly removing Twitter posts without prior authorization.
Now it appears that the decision to turn X into a more closed platform has stalled. Based on testing this week, X has continued to limit what people without accounts can see. WIRED examined several of its reporters’ It appears that accounts managed by government entities are not restricted in this way; All posts shared by the California Highway Patrol Alerts account can be viewed without logging in.
In addition to allowing anyone to view content shared on the platform, another way Twitter previously helped emergency communicators was by giving them free access to its API, which Musk later revoked. That permitted organizations such as the US National Tsunami Warning Center to send automatic alerts about potentially deadly natural disasters. Researchers and first responders could also use the API to monitor activity on Twitter and “extract key insights, such as identifying risk hotspots or combating misinformation,” Hughes says. “The platform’s role has changed as policy and public use evolve, so its effectiveness today may look quite different.”
Despite these drawbacks, X remains an important platform for transmitting information during emergency situations. In October, several government information officials he told PRWeek They planned to continue posting updates about But the incident in California this week highlights how government agencies can run into problems when third-party services once considered trustworthy then change their policies in unpredictable ways.