> A fair few local orgs use facebook exclusively for communication.
I noticed that when vaccine availability in the US was constrained during the first few months of 2021 and local governments were organizing vaccination clinics, several of the events were announced only on Facebook pages. Several towns/counties didn't seem to have websites, or didn't put the events on the ones they had, instead preferring to announce them on Facebook.
It was scary to think that folks locked out of Facebook for whatever reason did not have access to those notices unless informed by a friend or family member.
> Several towns/counties didn't seem to have websites, or didn't put the events on the ones they had, instead preferring to announce them on Facebook.
Yeah, no government agency should publish anything (however trivial) exclusively over a private platform. As far as I'm concerned it should be illegal and anything they do post on social media should always be a mirror of the same content posted to a public platform and retained according to the laws that agency should follow for their documents.
People should never have to worry about a private company being a barrier between them and their own government, and no private company should have the ability to pick and choose who can view what the government publishes, or to secretly modify that content (perhaps selectively), or to remove content that should stay part of public record.
I don't think that really solves it, though; they just have to have someone in the office go to all the Facebook posts of the notifications, print them out, and snail mail them to you. Possibly time-consuming and therefore expensive, but FOIA-compliant.
Does it makes sense to push for representatives to discuss a law to forbid a city or state announcements to use any commercial platform for announcements?
I think it makes more sense to mandate they post on a govt-funded platform simultaneously with any other media.
More media (Facebook etc) means reaching more people, that's not a bad thing, but it IS a bad thing for everyone else to get the info late if the govt only updates their "official" site once a week or something, but updates twitter every few minutes.
I noticed that when vaccine availability in the US was constrained during the first few months of 2021 and local governments were organizing vaccination clinics, several of the events were announced only on Facebook pages. Several towns/counties didn't seem to have websites, or didn't put the events on the ones they had, instead preferring to announce them on Facebook.
It was scary to think that folks locked out of Facebook for whatever reason did not have access to those notices unless informed by a friend or family member.