I just thought I would share this article.
https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/hype-and-type-first-responders-address-social-media-misinformation/
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I decided to bump this post because Iâm a bit grouchy. It seems like the last 2 or 3 years the disinformation has gotten worse. The creek went from an illegal pot grow that the sheriffs department decided to burn to it was a local sheriffs deputies kid that had a grow and a camp fire and the forest service was trying to cover it up for the local sheriffs.
All of the big lightning busts were somehow all arson because they all started at the same time. Then when you tell them thatâs kinda what lightning does they put there fingers in their ears going lalalalala. With the canada fireS making the east coast hazier the stuff I read makes me go wft is wrong with these people.
To top it off a bunch these people say forest service firefighters just watch fires burn. People have gone so far as to call an a BC who was initial ic on a fire at home and threaten them with physical violence and death. All of this from the crap that gets spread all over social media.
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I agree with you. The bulletin board was the social media at the time when I started. Local news was a half hour because all they reported was the News.
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At this time, PIOs might think twice about depending on Twitter and Facebook, who appear bound and determined to find ways to charge the public admission for their content. This is the âpublic squareâ issue. It should seem obvious that wildfire emergency information from PIOs must be held to a higher standard than just any old stream of consciousness free-for-all.
Consider a few components;
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Free speech; thereâs a difference between emergency information broadcast from a PIO, and a forum for public debate. This is largely a matter of âconvenienceâ. Twitter and FB were convenient. Now, not so much, because there are cost of admission factors now that did not exist then. What would you do if you showed up at the ops tent for a briefing and there was a bouncer out front charging admission? Youâd start looking up the term âmisconductâ.
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Moderation; the free speech powers largely derive from the concept of the platform as a public square, that the PIO is a stall at the fair. There is a place for that, but its not the same place as the morning ops briefing.
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Hosting; last year, there were quite a few people, myself included, that simply walked away from Twitter. I explored the new ActivityPub protocols, sometimes labeled âfediverseâ. This comes from the fact that this protocol is decentralized. More like a fleet than a cruise ship. Server owners can set their own content and moderation policies and are not beholden to the most radical and extreme voices, because the legal argument of âno where else to goâ thatâs driven a lot of the Twitter milieu doesnât exist. Agencies have had over a year to âlook at the issuesâ.
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Confounding technical, legal and economic factors.
Perhaps, another consequence of understaffing. The issue of exposure to legal jeopardy for misconduct may be gaining traction as more agencies speak up about the issues they are facing. PIOs should not be forced to simply have to âshout downâ a massed crowd every time they want to post some advisories and cautions, and the public should not be forced to have to buy tickets to a public spectacle to be told their access road may be closed.
It may help to break the issue down into its legal and technical components.
Supposing a legal barrier where its actually a matter of being aware of a better technical solution; ActivityPub (of which Mastodon is just one of many different implementations) is one example.
Maybe, its just not where all your friends are.
Educate yourself on the basic technical differences between the Twitter and Facebook way, and the ActivityPub way, and that might give you some insight as to what the agencies are looking at, or perhaps what they should be looking at. Iâm not suggesting Mastodon as a drop-in replacement, per se, but that I think its generally in the right direction from where some PIOs might find themselves now. There are a significant number of âonly wayâ arguments that donât hold water.
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Very few people outside hard-core Twitter haters are moving to new sites like Mastadon.
Facebook IS the local newspaper in most rural communities, and I see very few ruralites moving to Mastadon, BlueSky, or any of the new Twitter alternatives.
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âThree Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.â
- Tolkien, âThe Lord Of The Ringsâ
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They told us the same thing about: Prodigy, Delphi, America Online, GeoCities, Yahoo Groups, Google Plus, and on and on. Parking a softball lob, like âhard-core Twitter hatersâ, shouldnât be too much of a problem. That speaks directly to breaking the issue down into its legal, technical and economic components. Pitch it like you mean it.
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Itâll be interesting to see how it plays out. I have enjoyed watching PIOs transition to social media over the past 15 years or so, and seeing how much of the rollout happened without the blessing of higher-ups. Almost all of the best innovation in web-based wildfire communications (both internal and external) has happened in a vacuum of national or state leadership. Plans Chiefs or Situation Leaders just did things like setting up a Box.com or Google Drive account and their teams started using it. PIOs started setting up Gmail accounts for their incidents because it was easy and you didnât have to deal with anyone in IT back at the office. The NIFC FTP site started its life as a random UNIX server Dale Guenther set up in his Portland office. Itâs really no way to run a national-scale enterprise, but when you look at the national-scale systems that HAVE been set up thru official channels (ROSS, VIPR, Inciweb, Incinet, SAM), they have almost always been less usable/stable than the off-the-shelf apps like Dropbox or Gmail.
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I will give some kudos to CAL-FIRE for embracing Box.com at an enterprise level. But we all know the work arounds we had to do with license seats etc. Like Zeke said it was need to be more agile that drove all of these grassroot efforts.
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One recent issue with Twitter being the throttling that has occurred. A little bit of scrolling on a day like RRU had the last few days and suddenly youâve hit a âlimitâ and canât see anymore for an âindiscriminate amount of time.â That bodes well with an incident getting The Message out to the people.
Metaâs Threads, which will (so they say) eventually tie into ActivityPub, is where a lot of masses just shifted to from Twitter, but itâs more pop-culture-y at the moment with little room for the formality a PIOâs message needs. Formality being the ability to cut through the revenue-generating algorithms and getting The Message out to the people, in a linear timeline.
One important thing to consider, to all of us here, is the entire ecosystem of fire (and weather) intel is still relatively intact on Twitter. Itâs really easy to fall into that false sense of security that nothingâs really changed and âjust the extremistsâ are leaving Twitter for elsewhere. In the blink of an eye, soon, The People (who need to hear The Message) will have moved on and those left will be talking to themselves in an echo chamber as if nothing is wrong. This is a moment in time where head-on-a-swivel doesnât just apply to the folks on the line. Miss the last train out of the station and suddenly the only comments to your tweets will be about space lasers and secret cabals who just want the wood supply to burn to keep real-estate prices up.
Itâll be a very diluted and scattered audience for a while as these companies clamor for users, and revenue.
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I just quit using Instagram. My feed had turned into a constant stream of tits, asses, fistfights, motorcycle wrecks and other canât-look-away carnage. If Threads is based on Instagram, Iâm not very excited about its prospects, nor am I keen to get back on there. The media ecosystem is suffering almost as much as the natural one. Itâs hard to pick which billionaire I want to generate free content for. YouTube livestreams are still a good fit for me, but they take a lot of work. Standalone websites arenât dead, but you still need social media to drive engagement.
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Not sure if this is the right topic, or if even belongs on the .org instead of side channels, but heads up.
Tech giant Google announced Friday that it will begin experimenting with removing links to California news websites on its search platform, in response to an Assembly bill that would require the company to pay for journalism content that it links to. The move was a major preemptive escalation in opposition to the bill, which has not yet become law but has already sparked debate over who would benefit, and whether restricting access to news content might inhibit democracy. AB 886, dubbed the California Journalism Preservation Act, would require social media companies such as Google and Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to pay a fee for every article that is shared on their platforms. The bill has passed out of the Assembly and currently sits in the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a blog post Friday, Jaffer Zaidi, Google vice president for global news partnerships, called that proposed fee a âlink taxâ and said that that would be âunworkable.â
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article287632310.html
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Disclosure and Opinion: As a news and intel contributor, I think AB 886, or something like it, is necessary, not only in terms of First Amendment considerations, but also in terms of public safety. For example; when we hear and read terms, like âsupportâ and âconcernâ, we should be careful not to jump to conclusions about just what they mean in context. Fire reporters and journalists are critical to this task.
Suppose that executives at Google News think this is a âcanât loseâ prospect since they can suppress the very news organizations that are aligned against them on AB 886? I hope they reconsider the leaders they have chosen and the decisions they have made regarding the current performance of Google News and itâs future. They have not made very good decisions on this and have lost nearly every time. Yet, they are taking another huge gamble with their goodwill and reputation as public safety cooperators, and our public safety.
Iâm sure we can all think of a few examples of âfire pornâ, but we can also think of many more journalists and reporters who do excellent work, both in the field and behind the desk. People weâve heard of, seen and known, Pulitzers or not; like Mike Elias, Kent Porter, Brandy Carlos, Stuart Pally, photojournalists and writers, on camera and off, at the Tribs, Times(es), Chrons, Bees, local Fox stations, small independents and freelancers all over the state.
Extreme fire behavior can be a spectacular and photogenic thing, and that will attract a certain type of media. But people need to see what they are up against, and the conditions and sacrifices wildland firefighters are confronted with. Love them or hate them individually, the free-as-in-freedom press are here for this, just like you and me.
I support Californiaâs fire reporters and journalists and I think CalFireâs world-class relationship with them is worth defending and preserving. Especially, when kleptocrats and their sycophants feel driven to desperate measures. Perhaps, they may know who they are, perhaps not.
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âMe and all my friends think your opinion is right on, dude! Remember, a like is as good as a vote! Party on, friends!â
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Beware of people chasing fire clout for social media trying get their grievances aired on a podcast and sending them dramatic video possibly showcasing their own mistakes or stupidity. If you see people taking these potentially life threatening risks for a literal hot take they need to be reported and dismissed from the incident.
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I find it ironic that these videos and photos are being shared by a person who has a very biased view against fire photographer journalists like @OrangeCurtain .
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Twitter is much worse with wrong data and disinformation than years past. There are unfortunately people reporting on fire, on some platforms, that do more conspiracy spreading and ad-hominem attacks on first responders, scientists, etc than they do work in the field. Always check someoneâs credentials, their sources, and have a good mental BS detector.
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Itâs fallen into the BATSHâŚT crazy and just plain hateful at times. Verify then Verify again.
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