If you look at pre-idiot-king Twitter, when there's an earthquake it fills up with comments about it, and very rapidly. Geological advisories get retweeted, again very rapidly. It turns out that yeah, this kinda actually works!

I am not, I stress, saying that I like that this is the reality of things, but it speaks for itself.

Like, tongue in cheek, but until the mad weirdo took over, Twitter was no less effective and open-access readable than an app, while requiring zero engineering effort from organizations that don't have engineering capability.