Californians say X prevents them from seeing Amber Alerts about missing 14-year-olds

People in Missouri reported experiencing a similar problem in July 2023, when the Missouri Highway Patrol sent out another Amber Alert push notification with a link to post X. Local residents similarly spoke of how they could not see the alert unless they logged into the platform. “It was a nice change” from how the alerts used to work, says Missouri Highway Patrol Lt. Eric Brown, who works in the department’s public information and education department.

But the incident didn’t encourage the Missouri Highway Patrol to drop 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 problem disappeared and ​​the public could once again “access the our places”.

Many of the official X-counts of the California Highway Patrol have the same verification badge as the Missouri Highway Patrol, including that one specifically dedicated to spreading active alerts throughout the state. However, not all California agency accounts appear to be verified, including what it looks like the official channel for the Southern Division of the CHP, which includes Los Angeles County.

When it was known as Twitter, X was widely seen as an essential part of the global disaster and emergency communications infrastructure. Government officials and agencies around the world rely on the service as a way to deliver information about hurricanes, mass shootings and other crises. Before Musk took over the platform in 2022, anyone could see public tweets in their browser, regardless of whether they had an account on the site or installed the Twitter mobile app. (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 to close the content behind a login screen started popping up online. At that time, Musk called The move is a “temporary emergency measure” that was put in place because X was “getting data looted so much that it degraded the service”. It is not clear exactly what Musk was referring to, but the same month he expressed concerns on AI companies like OpenAI allegedly scraping Twitter posts without prior authorization.

Now it seems that the decision to turn X into a more closed platform stuck. According to tests conducted this week, X has continued to limit what people without accounts can see. WIRED looked at several of its staff reporters’ X accounts without logging in, for example, and was only able to see a sampling of their popular posts rather than a full chronological feed. It appears that accounts managed by government entities are not limited in this way; All posts shared by the California Highway Patrol alert 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 free access to its API, which Musk later revoked. What you do permitted organizations such as the US National Tsunami Warning Center to send automatic warnings 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 points or combating misinformation,” says Hughes. “The role of the platform has changed as policies and public use evolve, so its effectiveness today may look very different.”

Despite these drawbacks, X still remains an important platform for transmitting information in emergency situations. In October, many emergency government information officials he told PRWeek they thought they would continue to publish updates on X despite its diminished usefulness because they had accumulated a large following on the site, and their priority remains in order to ensure that accurate information reaches as many people as possible. But the incident in California this week highlights how government agencies can run into problems when third-party services once considered reliable then change their policies in unpredictable ways.