I’m speaking tomorrow on a panel at Georgetown University on social media implications for the defense community. Here is a summary of what I’ll be talking about.
The defense community needs to understand the social media phenomenon in order to do five things well: listen, understand, engage, defend, and collaborate.
The interesting thing to note is that the diplomatic community also needs to understand social media for the same reasons, and there is great value in the two communities working together in their use of social media tools.
The other thing to note is that I’m only discussing the public part of the social web. I don’t research, and have no expertise in, traditional cyber security concerns like critical infrastructure security, viral warfare, or the surveillance of private email or phone conversations.
My research is focused on how business and civil society organizations use social media, and the pointers here are rooted in that understanding.
1. Listen: As a result of the increasing use of social media around the world, the defense community, for the first time, has access to rich public conversations taking place between citizens of foreign countries. These conversations are often more personal, more authentic and more diverse that the discussions on foreign mainstream media. In my mind, the single most important implication of social media for the defense community is the ability to listen to raw public conversations between foreign nationals. This ability can be used to get a sense of popular public opinion in both friendly and unfriendly countries and to flag flash points that have diplomacy or security implications. For instance, the #mumbai feed on Twitter became an important source of news and public opinion in the aftermath of the November 26 Mumbai terror attack.
2. Understand: Social media conversations tend to be non-linear, messy and colloquial, and the volume of these conversations is simply overwhelming. It is not humanly possible to listen to and make sense of these conversations. Therefore, organizations, including defense organizations, need a mix of machine and human methods to track, tag, aggregate, and make sense of these conversations. Several services like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, TNS Symphony and JD Power Umbria offer brand monitoring services to corporates using a mix of machine learning, natural language processing and human intervention. I’m sure the defense community has access to even more advanced algorithms. The key however is to layer these algorithms with a deep understanding of the cultural context in which these conversations are happening.
3. Engage: Social media is also a powerful tool for engaging in conversations in order to shape public opinion both within and outside the country. At the very least, these conversations need to be personal and authentic to work. Israel tried to use social media for propaganda during the Gaza conflict, but the tactics failed as most people saw it as propaganda and rejected it. Social media is also a great tool for using social connections to spread messages and mobilize collective action. It helps if the campaign has virality and modularity built into it, so that people want to pass along the message and small individual actions get aggregated into large collective actions. For instance, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign used both virality and modularity to leverage the collective power of his supporters.
4. Defend: All technology is agnostic and so is social media. Social media can be used to strengthen the civil society and build a networked public sphere, but it can also be used for astroturfing and hacktervism. China’s 50 Cent Party, an army of 350,000 nationalistic volunteers who are paid to post comments supporting the party line in online conversations about the Chinese Communist Party, is the most well-known example of astroturfing. Kremlin has mastered the art of propaganda so well that it doesn’t even need to use censorship on the Russian internet, and Iran is reportedly building its own astroturfing army. Russia and China are also at the forefront of hacktervism, which involves mixing activism and hacking. Hacktervism can involve using social media tools to organize a hackers network. A good example is the Honker Union of China, which successfully attacked more than a thousand United States websites after a mid-air collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter aircraft in April 2001 triggered off strong nationalistic sentiments in China. Hacktervism can also involve using social media tools to recruit unsuspecting activists into a botnet which can then be used to launch denial of service (DDOS) attacks. This was recently seen in the Russia-Georgia and the Israel-Gaza conflicts.
5. Collaborate: Finally, social media can play an important role in enabling collaboration and strengthening the sense of community within the defense community. Classified initiatives like Intellipedia and A-Space are important first steps in this direction. However, such collaboration can also happen on an informal basis over mainstream social networking tools like blogs, Facebook and Twitter, by building bridges between the defense organizations themselves and between defense organizations and the outside world, especially the academia.
I understand that defense personnel are bound by several constraints that prevent them from using social media tools in a meaningful way: limited access to these tools at work, strong restrictions on what can or cannot be said, and a top down command and control structure.
However, the social web has already become an integral part of our social lives and it’s imperative that the defense community understands the changing dynamics of our increasingly social world.
Also see: My recent unclassified talk on international digital activism at Defense Intelligence Agency (PPTX/ PDF).
