Tweeting From the Front Line

blackbearnh writes "There's an interesting article up on O'Reilly Radar talking about how the US military is reacting to the increasing use of social media by soldiers in hostile territory. In an interview, Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, talks about the trade-offs between operational security and allowing soldiers and the public to interact, and how social media has changed the way the DoD communicates with the public. 'I think that we need to become much more comfortable with taking risk, much more comfortable with having multiple spokesmen out there, thousands of spokesmen in essence. But, for me, there's nothing more credible than the men and women who are out there on the front lines, fighting the wars that we're in, sending messages back to their family and friends.'"

Comments

Tweeting

[TrisexualPuppy]

...is only slightly less inane than farting

American "Freedom"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hilarious that American troops, who are supposedly from a culture that emphasized "freedom" and who are supposedly fighting for the "freedom" of other people, basically have all of their freedom stripped away.

It's not a new phenomenon, of course. It happened during WWI and WWII, when any correspondence to and from American soldiers was read and censored by the military.

Re:American "Freedom"

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe conversations like that wouldn't happen if the military wasn't made up of stupid white trash, convicts, and Mexicans.

Then again, smart people who know when to keep their mouths shut don't bother joining the military. They know better than to risk their bodies and lives fighting in remote third-world nations in conflicts that mainly benefit only a very small number of supranational "defense" and energy corporations.

mod 3own

[Anonymous Coward]

study. _[rice.edu] slings are limited,