The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is the regulator for vaccines and medicine in the European Union (EU), has stopped using the social media platform X. The website is owned by Elon Musk, who is an important ally of the newly elected United States president Donald Trump. The EMA, whose headquarters are based in Amsterdam, is currently the only EU organization to leave the platform.
Twitter was spiraling long before Musk bought them. He is accelerating its demise, of course, but he wasn’t the cause.
The cause is the basic concept.
nah twitter was great, I tweeted all the time, it hit its peak years before he bought it but still was a solid “news” source
Twitter was the default way for any famous individual to address their fan base, and government agencies around the world to communicate to the public.
Train delays, road closures, states of emergency, it was all done through Twitter. They weren’t spiralling anywhere.
And here we see, that a government should never rely upon a private company with important stuff like communication with its people.
My dear sweet child, governments use private companies to communicate to their citizens all the time.
They advertise on TV, they have ads on bus shelters, they give interviews on commercial radio and TV stations. Even systems like emergency broadcast systems use cellular networks and TV and radio stations run by private companies.
Even government websites are seldom hosted on their own servers.
Using a third party website specifically set up to communicate short, sharp, and to the point messaging as one way of getting information out is just sensible.
they just weren’t making the kind of money that pleased the vultures and wall street.