I feel very hot and cold about social media. There’s certainly times that I love it and being able to keep in touch with certain people in an easier fashion than individual emails, text messages, Christmas cards, or phone calls. But … I have security concerns about these platforms as well (caveat / confession — yes, ack this varies on the platform, some have manageable privacy settings whilst others are basically public). I personally don’t “friend” people I work with unless we are “IRL friends”. So that’s on an individual level.

For unit level, I also feel very conflicted about sharing things in these spaces that relate to military life. A lot of times it feels to me like a crowdsourced CCTV. There’s a lot that goes on in a unit that shouldn’t go on social media (just as you wouldn’t put it on a billboard) and becomes an OPSEC risk. There’s two specific hurtful ways that I see Soldiers using social media (Facebook) is by either ranting about what’s going on around them (whether a long day in garrison, field training, or deployed) or enhancing the civil-military divide and/or military as an elite class mentality (functionally, via memes). I definitely bounce around with my personal use of different platforms and my use of those platforms. That being said, to me it’s very harrowing to think that a minor exchange/discussion on social media now could be taken out of context in the future and I am responsible for all the data on my own pages, at this point over a decade of data and interactions. I see social media as a really powerful databank, a tool to be used cautiously, and I’m not sure it’s really thought of as such.

As others have likely experienced, a significant negative effect is people using social media (Facebook) like a Yelp or Google review page for a unit or service. IMHO, that usually creates a bombshell of a problem that likely (although not always) could have been solved through other means of communication and just causes the unit to spin their wheels doing PR damage control for hours or days. For the positive — that it enables sharing of sources and info — yes, I agree that’s a great element, especially for example, maybe, medical communities sharing that info with customers/patients. I could imagine that interaction playing out as a patient contacts a general help desk, but then gets helpfully redirected to the correct department via a Tag for a page or PM with particular information. That being said, I don’t see that benefit for the “average unit” (if such an animal really exists in the Army, haha). I don’t see the difference between this usage and what could be fulfilled via a well-managed website (which is to say that social media is just HTML Lite; that’s a whole separate conversation!) and a communicative FRG. I’m sure there’s some scenarios here others have experienced that cover a gap I’ve missed, and I’m interested to hear more of those.