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By GI Korea on June 13th, 2009 at 8:29 pm

Army Reverses Course On Social Media Blocks

» by GI Korea in: US Military

Different US military installations seem to have different standards on what social media sites are blocked and it looks like at the least the Army is trying to standardize what social media sites should be allowed:

The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.

Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service’s stories through social sites like Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Links to those sites featured prominently on the Army.mil homepage. The Army carefully nurtured a Facebook group tens of thousands strong, and posted more than 4,100 photos to a Flickr account. Yet the people presumably most interested in these sites — the troops — were prevented from seeing the material. Many Army bases banned access to the social networks.

An operations order from the Army’s 93rd Signal Brigade to all domestic Directors of Information Management, or DOIMs, aims to correct that. Issued on May 18th “for official use only,” the document has not been made public until now.

It is “the intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to ‘tell the Army story’ and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information,” says the order, obtained by Danger Room. Therefore, “the social media sites available from the Army homepage will be made accessible from all campus area networks. Additionally, all web-based email will be made accessible.”  [Danger Room]

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  • Matt
    10:24 am on June 14th, 2009 1

    Can anyone comment on whether or not they’ve loosened up the reins across Korea’s military networks? I’m heading back into country in a few weeks and I hate it when some DoIM decides to unilaterally be an internet Nazi. Any information would be appreciated.

    Reply

    guitard
    June 14th, 2009 at 10:57 am

    Unless there has been a recent change – the answer to your question is they have not loosened up.

    Before youtube got blocked, I knew of a soldier who spent several hours a day on his office computer watching hip-hop related videos on youtube.

    He claimed he could still get his office work done on his computer with the videos playing off to the side of the page. It seemed as though most of the time when I looked, he was just watching videos though.

    Reply

  • Cloying_Odor
    6:17 pm on June 14th, 2009 2

    It’s blocked and will stay blocked. The decree from 93rd signal is only for CONUS networks. 8th Imperial Army is still making it’s own rules.

    Reply

 

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