Social Media

Abstract

Military operations define a broad realm of actions from conducting acts of war to providing humanitarian assistance, supporting civil authorities, and ensuring the legitimacy of operations to the public. It is imperative that the military has the best capabilities in order to carry out these operations as effectively and efficiently as possible. Social media provide the military with a multitude of capabilities that can aid in its efforts. Specifically, social media tools include blogs, social networking sites, wikis, and multimedia sharing sites among others. All of the aforementioned tools have been found to have legitimate uses for aiding military operations. In an effort to further social media usage in the Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the Secretary of Defense issued Directive-Type Memorandum (DTM) 09-026 "Responsible and Effective Use of Internet-based Capabilities." This memorandum allows the usage of social media as a default and sets forth general guidelines for their use. However, it is important to understand that this form of media does introduce a certain amount of risk to the military's cyber infrastructure. These risks must be addressed and properly mitigated to assure the safety of the networks and information contained within. It is obvious to the DoD that there must be more research into guidelines governing social media in order to safely use them, as the DTM delegates responsibilities to individual DoD components for establishing better directed guidelines that will form a new umbrella issuance in August 2010. The project focused on assessing the value of utilizing social media in military operations. Parallel to the assessment of value was the analysis of risks that the military would face as a result of employing these technologies.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA571496

Entities

People

  • Anne Bautch
  • Chris Fripp
  • Justin S Smith
  • Meghan Obermeyer
  • Shannon Benash
  • Stephanie Petersen
  • Ty Dilts

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Business Administration
  • Computer Network Security
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Employment
  • Information Systems
  • Internet
  • Military Science
  • Mobile Phones
  • National Security
  • Network Science
  • Online Communications
  • Personnel Management
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking Services
  • Social Networks
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Aviation Safety Risk Assessment.
  • Defense Financial Management and Audit.

Technology Areas

  • Cyber