By Noah Shachtman \/ Wired<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service\u2019s 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 \u2014 the troops \u2014 were prevented from seeing the material. Many Army bases banned access to the social networks.<\/p>\n
An operations order from the Army\u2019s 93rd Signal Brigade to all domestic Directors of Information Management, or DOIMs, aims to correct that. Issued on May 18th \u201cfor official use only,\u201d the document has not been made public until now.<\/p>\n
It is \u201cthe intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to \u2018tell the Army story\u2019 and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information,\u201d says the order, obtained by Danger Room. Therefore, \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The operations order (OPORD) doesn\u2019t apply to all GI Bases overseas, or those run by the other armed services, which aren\u2019t affected by the decree. Nor does the order overturn the long-standing, military-wide ban on sites like MySpace, YouTube and Pandora. And it\u2019s almost certain some Army posts that still block the now-approved web 2.0 networks. Still, it\u2019s a click in the right direction for the armed service which seems to be making a slow but steady recovery from its lingering hostility towards social media.<\/p>\n