BC. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations

DriveBC's Twitter account has maxed out on sharing crucial information on road conditions during a weekend of wildfire evacuations. Experts say this means the end of social media as a reliable platform in times of emergency.

A B.C. government Twitter account notifying residents of driving conditions reached its tweet limit on a weekend when it was sharing information about fire evacuations.

The incident, which happened earlier this month, prompted the Department of Transportation's DriveBC account to issue a warning.

"WARNING - Like many others over the weekend, @DriveBC on Twitter and its sub-accounts have exceeded the temporarily imposed post rate limit," the ministry's account tweeted on July 2 .

"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue in the future."

The outage, first reported by CBC News, lasted just over an hour but still has emergency preparedness experts worried, who say it's the latest sign that the once reliable platform can no longer be relied upon.

"It's sort of the end of public alerts via social media," said Ryan Reynolds, emergency preparedness consultant at Resilience Mapping Canada.

"These limitations essentially mean that we cannot deliver this information quickly and easily at any scale."

DriveBC has a dedicated website, but many access its automated messages through its Twitter account, a platform viewed by more than a quarter of Canadians in 2023, according to the company's advertising data.

In the past, Twitter's more than 370 million users accessed the platform as the last bastion of critical information during social upheavals and disasters. He played a crucial role in redirecting Pakistanis to a Red Crescent emergency help line during massive floods in 2022, and boosted information from emergency services when Hurricane Ian hit Florida last September.

Since the acquisition of the platform by Elon Musk, Twitter has implemented new rules that limit the number of automated tweets an account can send without paying. This decision was made in part in response to growing concerns that AI platforms would use the historical archives of social media platforms to train their large language models.

“We tried to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications,” Reynolds said. "But it really doesn't work once things change."

"We have to recognize that we always want to be where everyone is (so on social media), but we also need much more reliable fallbacks."

Other jurisdictions are feeling the pinch of Twitter's new limits

BC is far from the first jurisdiction to feel the effects of recent tweet limits. The US National Weather Service uses Twitter to share hurricane and tornado warnings. But on July 4, his Boulder, Colorado office tweeted that rate limits meant he was unable to sift through tweets during active severe weather events.

"Due to issues with Twitter rate limits, we are unable to access most tweets at this time," said NWS Boulder.

"Send reports to our other social media accounts or directly via our messaging/phone lines."

Similar warnings were sent to weather service offices in North Carolina and Virginia.

Some agencies have responded by cutting their use of Twitter as a source of critical information. Last week, Dutch politicians told Reuters that Twitter had become an unreliable platform after the most intense summer storm on record in the Netherlands tore through North Holland.

In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced in April that it would suspend use of the platform for service alerts after it was twice locked out of the application programming interface (API ) of the platform.

"The MTA has ceased posting information about the service on Twitter, effective immediately, as the reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed," said North America's largest transportation authority in a press release.

"The MTA does not pay technology platforms to publish service information and has built redundant tools that provide...