New Battleground: Social Media

In the past journalists have chronicled wars by piecing together news reports from eyewitnesses and military reports. Who knew that the history would come to the point where military forces would take the role of journalism themselves, distributing their own live reports and even taking the war itself to a whole new battleground--social media.

This idea became a reality when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) started live-blogging and tweeting about an attack on Hamas in the Gaza strip and uploading video of their rocket blasts to YouTube. As BuzzFeed notes in its round-up of Twitter posts from the Israeli army the IDF actually warned Hamas guerillas not to show themselves on the Gaza strip or risk being killed in the attacks that began last week.

Source: AP Press, Sebastian Scheiner

Article "Israel and Hamas battle on social media as well" discusses how militants have exchanged fiery tweets in order to influence public opinion. I found it interesting that after the IDF posted a video of airstrike on its official YouTube page, Google removed it, yet restored it later. This caught my attention, especially since I thought that Google refused to take down other videos, such as the "Innocence of Muslims" due to the "freedom of speech." Nevertheless, like the article states, "some people believe Google should always fall on the side of free expression because YouTube has become such an important forum for opinion, commentary and news."

"We have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression in everything we do," wrote Rachel Whetstone, Google's director of global communications and public affairs, "We are driven by a belief that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. But we also recognize that freedom of expression can't be — and shouldn't be — without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those boundaries are drawn."

I thought this article was very insightful not only because it introduces us to the "new war," but also explains in detail how social media sites and internet conglomerates like Google monitor and select the content. "In the first half of this year alone, Google said it received more than 1,700 court orders and other requests from government agencies around the world to remove more than 17,700 different pieces of content from its services." While regulations aren't certainly bad, I think what defines "freedom of speech" should be used more carefully, since certain content is still taken down.