The Social Security Administration backed off its plan to cut phone services, but it’s still taking steps to limit the ways that people will be able to access information about the essential agency. The SSA plans to stop issuing communications through normal channels like press releases and will instead make statements exclusively on X.
According to the report, the shift was made clear during internal meetings between agency managers. “We are no longer planning to issue press releases or those dear colleague letters to inform the media and public about programmatic and service changes,” SSA regional commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis said, per Wired. “Instead, the agency will be using X to communicate to the press and the public.”
The SSA pretty regularly engages with the public, including advocacy groups, through “Dear Colleague” letters that directly address the concerns of third parties who have questions or concerns about Social Security-related matters. Those are typically shared on the agency’s “News” page, which includes communications to advocates, statements from the SSA Press Office, and the agency’s newsletter. All of that, it seems, will disappear and be replaced by the SSA X feed.
The agency’s account currently has just over 138,000 followers. By comparison, about 73 million people (that’s about 1 in every 5 Americans) receive Social Security benefits of some kind and may be interested in updates regarding those services.
The shift to Elon Musk’s platform comes after several high-profile instances of the SSA website going down after the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency slashed its IT team. Outages have lasted full days at certain points, but the administration has claimed it has nothing to do with DOGE’s efforts, which have already left the agency short-staffed and scrambling.
Anyway, those outages will probably be used as justification for shifting communication to X, which has been Musk’s preferred platform for communication even before he bought it. In 2020, Musk dissolved Tesla’s press office entirely and shifted the company’s comms exclusively to what was then Twitter. Shockingly, the company found it very difficult to communicate with the public and press.
For Tesla, the shift is vaguely justifiable, as the company’s customers are likely a little tech-savvy. That is distinctively not the case for Social Security, which primarily serves people of retirement age. People can start receiving their full Social Security benefits at 67 years old. Per publicly available demographic information about X’s user base, about 5% of its users are 65 years old or older. So the audience for SSA updates is not on the platform that the agency will primarily use to communicate. Seems not great.
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