God and Country

At times, the military has struggled with how to deal with social media, banning access to it from government computers at one point, then specifically allowing access to Facebook at another.  In the same vein, some servicemembers have had adverse action over their activities on the internet, including a Marine discharged over comments about President Obama and a Twitter ‘oops’ by another Marine — while the military simultaneously encourages its troops to “engage” in social media for family, health, morale, and even public relations reasons.

A recent statement by the Defense Privacy and Civil Liberties Office attempted to lend more thought to the sometimes confusing area, noting that servicemembers are free to express themselves, within some fairly liberal limits:  Read more…

If you’re a member of the US military and you’ve ever Facebook “Liked” President Barack Obama or Governor Mitt Romney, you’d better pay attention, because the Department of Defense just issued guidance that restricts that very thing.

Contrary to the conclusions of a prior article, the US DoD has just recently published official guidance on “political activities” in association with social media, and they’re fairly explicit.  The undated but very recently released “2012 Public Affairs Guidance for Political Campaigns and Elections” says:

• You can express yourself on issues and candidates:

An [active duty] Service member may generally express his or her own personal views on public issues or political candidates via social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, or personal Blogs, much the same as they would be permitted to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper.

• But, if you are “reasonably identifiable” as a member of the military, Read more…

In the ongoing saga of the US military and social media, SSgt Suneel Mehta is reportedly going to be punished for making a racially charged “tweet” referencing the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman controversy.

The Twitter message came to light when an anonymous person “reported” it to the Marine Corps Times.

Mehta apologized, deleted Read more…

The official USAFA Twitter feed was alerted to the presence of US Air Force Academy cadets from CS-38 parodying cadet life the song “Sexy and I Know It” on YouTube.  Their response was fairly strongly worded:

We’ve seen it, and we’ve notified their commanders. Their conduct is unbecoming of future Air Force officers.

If Public Affairs was reporting the official position that their “conduct is unbecoming,” that’s one thing.  But their statement that they’d only then notified their commanders indicated it was a personal judgment, not an official position.  Other surprised Read more…

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