Social Soldiers

For the last year or so the US Army has had something of a confused attitude to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The Army’s been actively using them as a public relations tool and for recruitment purposes. However new recruits who were attracted to the Army through social media would find that once they joined they were denied access to those services! These most social media sites have been routinely blocked on army bases, presumably due to security concerns.

That’s set to change now according to Wired. A directive has been issued to the Army’s domestic Director’s of Information Management (DOIMs) that access to these sites should be allowed from all “campus area networks”. The objective of this move is to:

leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to ‘tell the Army story’ and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information

The sites that should now be allowed on domestic US army bases are Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Twitter and Vimeo. Others such as YouTube, MySpace and hi5 will continue to be blocked for now.