Ask HN: Why can't the US government run their own social media?

4 points

2 years ago

With the news yesterday of POTUS joining threads.net and with the fanfare about the possibility of following him from other AP-compatible servers (like Mastodon), I was left wondering why is it that the White House couldn't just run their own services?

Doesn't "POTUS is using threads for social media" feel a bit like "POTUS is using outlook.com for email"?

Is there anything about the bureaucracy that stops their some small team to setup a Mastodon server on "social.whitehouse.gov" and make this a reality? I find it hard to believe that this would be "if it got hacked it could create diplomacy issues", because I don't think that Facebook is setting up any type of special infrastructure to deal with political figures on their platform. Also, none of this seems to be a problem for some of the EU governments.

Maybe I am missing something. If there is someone among you working with the US Goverment or aware of how their digital initiatives work and can shed some light into this?

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