Reposting of Tweets, Facebook Messages, etc

Everyone…If we could refrain from reposting Tweets and the like from other media platforms that would be very helpful for all. Tweets are not necessarily reliable intel and the reposting of those Tweets takes up server space. If there are major news links such as live footage links, which help obtain an objective view, we will continue to allow those to be included into the incident. Likewise if there are agency level Tweets, FB posts, etc, please feel free to post those. What we are trying to prevent is this becoming just another Twitter where anybody can say and post anything, a great deal of which is not verifiable.

As always, the Mod Team appreciates every thing you all are doing to assist us in keeping things tidy and organized with everything that is happening,

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The world would be better place without twitter, facebook and instagram and others

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90% of the relevant fire info for the dixie that’s on Twitter is from 2 people from what I can tell, CA scanner and pyrogeography. Then you have to sift through the dew comments because no timber or brush fire has ever got hot enough to melt aluminum or soften sheet metal… Then you have crap load of political opinion that no one asked about.

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Thanks, Slasher. I’m a Twitter newbie, and it’s been a good platform to reach a lot of people. Some of the photographers on there are really good, and it’s been cool to get ahold of them and swap intel. One of them made a trip by my brother’s place and checked on it for me. It’s a whole new media ecosystem, and Twitter and FB are part of it, but just like any media, you’ve got to figure out who is full of shite.

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With waders and a flak jacket, twitter is a great source for ground zero intel on IA when something breaks. There’s a reason they make the signs now say “in case of fire, escape building via stairs and call 911 BEFORE tweeting” Great for when something hits and it’s chaos, like fire investigation char marks, you look behind where people run from and eventually you find center. Great for major quakes too, quick pulse of what people are experiencing minutes later.

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Twitter has a pretty active wildfire science community and the weather geeks are off the hook. Definitely more nerd-central than FB, and it seems easier to avoid political arguments there.

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So to be clear, gleaning information from other sources is not the issue here. Especially when the source is someone that has shown themselves to be very reputable like the two mentioned above. The issue at hand is screen shotting their posts and copy and pasting it into the forum.

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@CAFireScanner is a kiwi doing his best to help us from across the Pacific.

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Screenshotting to me is far more effort than giving the relevant information or posting the link to it, I.E. every time someone screenshots a new start instead of just posting the camera link.

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If you post a link to a camera, when someone comes along to review the thread hours or days later the camera link might be updated and not what the OP saw. So sometimes a static shot will be the only thing with value.

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