On Sunday morning at around 11 a.m., as I was walking through the Stonestown Galleria, a blare of sirens buzzed all around me, including from my own pocket.
Like every other person around me, I pulled out my phone and saw an automated “Silver Alert” from the California Highway Patrol, this time for a missing elderly resident of Burlingame who had last been spotted near Alamo Square Park.
Alerts like these — which include Amber, Ebony, Feather, and others — are common enough. But when I clicked through the message on my screen, I was surprised to find myself redirected to a California Highway Patrol account on X, rather than a government site.
CHP is still using X? Why?
It’s hard to remember now, but Twitter was once the mainstream platform for public discourse, including formal announcements from government agencies and officials. This “public utility” era effectively ended with the takeover by Elon Musk in 2022. The site, now called X, is embroiled in major backlash from advertisers and defecting users due to two factors: the plummeting quality of its content due to a surge of AI slop, misinformation, and unmoderated hate speech, and the histrionic politics of its Trump-aligned figurehead and super user.
In other words, X’s usefulness as a trusted public platform is over. But, for the CHP, apparently, X remains the primary platform for one of its most important public safety functions. In fact, it doesn’t even keep a dedicated record of alerts on its actual governmental website; it lives on X.
Automated notifications for Amber, Silver, Ebony, and similar alerts were implemented in all 50 states by 2005. In 2013, the protocol shifted to the national Wireless Emergency Alerts system, which is operated by FEMA and forces a network of service providers to ping every phone in a certain geographic area during emergencies.
It was only in 2019, however, that the CHP’s Emergency Notification and Tactical Alert Center began including a hyperlink in its wireless emergency alerts, spokesperson Kelly DeLeon told Gazetteer SF. This is also when it began posting vital information primarily on what was then known as Twitter.
“In 2019, ENTAC began using X, known as Twitter at the time, to post missing persons alerts due to its real-time communication capabilities and broad reach,” DeLeon said in an email. “While ENTAC also posts the associated flyers to Instagram and Facebook, X is the only platform that allows the recipient to view the flyer in its entirety, without having an account.”
It is hard to believe that a national emergency alert sent to smartphones would somehow be unable to include a hyperlink in the first place, but it’s true: According to FEMA, the feature only debuted in 2018.
Not long after implementation, however, officials realized there was a big problem: The sheer number of people clicking on an alert link would crash law enforcement agency websites.
The cheap fix? Moving official communications to Twitter because it has “substantial internet infrastructure” that can “handle high visitor traffic,” as FEMA stated in 2023.
CHP has more than 246,000 followers on X, compared to about 2,000 on Instagram and 10,000 on Facebook.
“In some cases, ENTAC’s posts on X receive over 1 million interactions, indicating that more than 1 million individuals can aid in safely locating missing persons,” DeLeon said. “ENTAC has not established another footprint this large on any other platform.”
While this may be true, the purpose of wireless emergency alerts isn’t always to reach as many people as possible. In fact, the federal system has been attempting to narrow its reach using GPS to better target people in affected zones.
Meanwhile, faith in X as a public resource is falling. The growing unreliability of information shared on the site has led perception of the brand to new lows. The platform also remains vulnerable to “massive cyberattacks” in 2025 despite a lengthy history of failing to prevent major breaches that, according to experts, left government agencies exposed to security risks.
The real reason agencies like CHP continue posting to X, even amid the social network’s general air of decline, seems to be that it remains the most stable platform for a temporary stampede of online traffic. That is, for now, at least.
DeLeon says that the CHP is creating a “dedicated section on our official CHP website to host all alerts to provide the public with a reliable, easy-to-access archive of alerts.” Just in time for 2025.
