Missouri residents reported experiencing a similar problem in July 2023, when the Missouri Highway Patrol sent another Amber Alert push notification with a link to an X post. Local residents also explained that they could not see the alert unless they logged into the platform. “It was quite a change” from how the alerts worked, said Missouri Highway Patrol Lt. Eric Brown, who works in the Department of Public Information and Education.
But the incident ultimately didn’t prompt the Missouri Highway Patrol to abandon X as the go-to platform for Amber Alert push notifications. According to Brown, when
Several official California Highway Patrol X accounts carry the same verification badge as the Missouri Highway Patrol, including the one dedicated specifically to issuing active alerts throughout the state. However, not all of the California agency’s accounts appear to be verified, including what does it look like the official channel of the CHP Southern Division, which includes Los Angeles County.
When it was called Twitter, widely consulted as an essential part of the global communications infrastructure for disasters and emergencies. Government officials and agencies around the world relied on the service to disseminate information about hurricanes, mass shootings and other crises. Before Musk took over the platform in 2022, anyone could view public tweets in their browser, whether they had an account on the site or had Twitter’s mobile app installed. (In 2015, the company reported that more than 500 million people visited Twitter each month without logging in.)
In June 2023, reports that started locking content behind a login screen started appearing online. At the time, Musk called This is a “temporary emergency measure” that was put in place because X was “having so much data theft that it was degrading the service.” It’s unclear exactly what Musk was referring to, but that same month he expressed concerns about AI companies like OpenAI allegedly deleting posts on Twitter without prior permission.
It now appears that the decision to turn X into a more closed platform has stalled. According to testing this week, X has continued to limit what people without accounts can see. WIRED looked at several of its journalists’ X accounts without logging in, for example, and was only able to see a sampling of their popular posts rather than a full timeline feed. It does appear that accounts managed by government entities are not limited 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, Twitter also helped emergency communicators by giving them free access to its API, which Musk later revoked. That authorized organizations such as the US National Tsunami Warning Center to send automatic alerts about life-threatening 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 role of the platform has changed as policies and public use evolve, so its effectiveness today may look very different.”
Despite these drawbacks, X remains an important platform for relaying information during emergency situations. In October, several government information officers told PRWeek they planned to continue posting updates on . But the incident in California this week shows how government agencies can run into trouble when third-party services once considered reliable then change their policies in unpredictable ways.
