How does having a reliable twitter-like service help? I can think of a few ways this could work:
1. Government/regulator-run account that publishes a message for every product recall.
2. Each manufacturer is required to run an account that is only for recall announcements.
3. Each manufacturer is required to run a separate account for every product they ship that is only for recall announcements for that particular product.
All of these suffer from problems that I think make them infeasible.
#1 is probably the easiest to get people to subscribe to (since they only have to do it once), but then any announcement for a product they own is drowned in all the noise from products they don't care about.
#2 is perhaps the worst of both worlds: customers have to remember to subscribe when they buy a product from a manufacturer they haven't bought from before (though at least they don't have to re-subscribe for successive products from that manufacturer). But same problem as in #1 where they will likely miss announcements related to their product, since there will be announcements for a bunch of other products too.
#3 is the best from a signal-to-noise ratio perspective, but I don't see a lot of customers remembering to subscribe to a new recall feed every time they buy a new product.
The only way to ensure that people get notified when they've bought products that are later determined to be dangerous is to somehow require that the point-of-sale process includes product registration. But that's terrible from a privacy perspective, among other things.
Absolutely. What governments use Twitter for is too important to be left up to the erratic people running Twitter.
Especially when anonymous users are prevented from participating or even seeing follow-up information, as is the case now.
I don't know much about Mastodon or have an opinion regarding whether it should be used, but I agree that relying on Twitter to disseminate official information is unacceptable. The well has been irrevocably poisoned.
This is why we absolutely DO need a reliable "twitter."
Mastodon's the right model for this; companies and governments (and safety orgs) need to go ahead and set up their servers and run these things.
This is one of these things that's painfully obvious to me and I'm not sure why there's not more of a push for it.
Even the BIG COMPANIES benefit; this model would have prevented the "Eli Lilly" thing.