The mayor of Princeton is voicing his frustration and concern after multiple municipal links were apparently removed from several community Facebook groups Friday and Saturday.
“Everything my staff has put up has disappeared. Meetings, public hearings, bylaws, notices about water shut offs or road closures, anything we would post back to our main website has been removed.”
Coyne said the reason the posts were removed, according to Facebook, was because they went “against our Community Standards on cybersecurity.”
“It’s a struggle especially during the fire season here,” said Coyne. “It just makes it really, really frustrating because how do you post a PDF that says where the evacuations are, this is the map, this is the information you need to know, when those pieces of information keep disappearing from the social media channels that we use?”
Sounds like people are reporting some of the posts as SPAM/PHISHING... and that there have been enough reports to take down all posts containing links to the municipality.
It's amazing how Facebook managed to be the AOL that AOL never quite got too.
Governments are slow to respond, but it's hard to envision a future where they don't all migrate to running their own Fediverse servers. It's easy, especially if all you want to do is run a locked-down one and post info for dissemination, and you have total control (which gov'ts love). Easy to use, no platform lock-in, data is portable all over the place. The idea that our social infrastructure has become dependent on lunatic tech billionaires is nuts, and the sooner we can contribute to, but not depend on, those networks the better.
because how do you post a PDF that says where the evacuations are
If only there was some kind of way for a fancy abacus – what I like to call a computer – connected somehow to other computers, to run in such a way that it can service requests from those other computers. For the sake of this comment, let's call it a web. The computer with the PDF could run what we shall call a web server, and the other computers can run what we will call a web browser. Anyone with a web browser can connect to the web server and ask it to send them the PDF. Wouldn't that be amazing?
Alas, back to my team of horses waiting on me to plow this field.
It is customary to not include every last word ever uttered by someone when quoting. The purpose of quoting is only to setup context, not to free someone from reading anything else. Obviously you understood that by virtue of you having read the entire text, as any rational person would, but then somehow became confused about what you just did?
Is this merely pretend confusion in the name of wanting to call someone a meaningless name that has no relevance to anything?