Friended at the Front

Social Media in the American War Zone

Lisa Ellen Silvestri

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700621361, 9780700621361
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Winner: James W. Carey Media Research Award

For most of us, clicking “like” on social media has become fairly routine. For a Marine, clicking “like” from the battlefield lets his social network know he’s alive. This is the first time in the history of modern warfare that US troops have direct, instantaneous connection to civilian life back home. Lisa Ellen Silvestri’s Friended at the Front documents the revolutionary change in the way we communicate across fronts. Social media, Silvestri contends, changes what it’s like to be at war.

Based on in-person interviews and online fieldwork with US Marines, Friended at the Front explores the new media habits, attitudes, and behaviors of troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of the complications that emerge in their wake. The book pays particular attention to the way US troops use Facebook and YouTube to narrate their experiences to civilian network members, to each other, and, not least of all, to themselves. After she reviews evolving military guidelines for social media engagement, Silvestri explores specific practices amongst active duty Marines such as posting photos and producing memes. Her interviews, observations, and research reveal how social network sites present both an opportunity to connect with civilians back home, as well as an obligation to do so—one that can become controversial for troops in a war zone.

Much like the war on terror itself, the boundaries, expectations, and dangers associated with social media are amorphous and under constant negotiation. Friended at the Front explains how our communication landscape changes what it is like to go to war for individual service members, their loved ones, and for the American public at large.

CHAPTER 1

Incongruities across Social Media
and Military Cultures

For Marine Corps sergeant Gary Stein, fifteen words on Facebook cost him a nine-year military career. His Facebook post said that he would not follow certain orders issued by the president and included an image of the president’s face superimposed on a poster for Jackass: The Movie. Stein made those comments to a Facebook group called the Armed Forces Tea Party, which he founded in 2010 as a platform to criticize President Barack Obama’s health care plans. When he created the Tea Party website in 2010, his superiors at Camp Pendleton cautioned him about posting political opinions online, citing a possible violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Two years later, when he posted the Jackass image, the Marine Corps reduced his rank, docked his pay, and eventually discharged him less than honorably without benefits. Stein tried to appeal the decision, but a federal judge of the US District Court for Southern California, Marilyn Huff, denied his request, reportedly telling one of Stein’s attorneys, “You understand it’s a pretty sensitive comment that he made. He can’t do that.”¹ Yet, at the time, it was not entirely clear what Stein, or other service members like him, could or could not do online.

The internet poses a new set of questions concerning the degree of service members’ digital freedoms, especially the boundaries distinguishing their professional public lives from their personal private lives. In the case of former Marine sergeant Gary Stein, military officials circumvented the murky waters of online personhood by indicting him on charges that he breached service custom and violated Department of Defense (DOD) directive 1344, which states that service members cannot speak out against leaders currently in office.² Military service custom dictates respect for rank. Although personnel do not necessarily have to respect the person holding the rank, they must respect the rank they hold. This includes the commander in chief (CIC) of the armed forces, the president of the United States. Sergeant Stein violated that code, so the military dismissed him. Yet Stein’s case also signifies an emergent and rather incongruous cultural conjuncture between the military’s top-down, professional chain of command and the impossibly fragmented social space of the internet. As such, Stein’s Facebook activities presented military officials with a chance to meaningfully address increasingly complicated boundaries between a service member’s professional identity and personal life in the Web 2.0 era. The legal proceedings, however, did not fully address this issue, thereby neglecting to establish a solid precedent for future social media cases.

Stein’s case and others like it raise important questions about managing our lifeworlds, both online and off-line. The widespread use of personal computers, internet accessibility, and the proliferation of social network sites (even in Iraq and Afghanistan) pose fundamental challenges to the maintenance of dualities between our public/professional and private/personal selves.

Some communication scholars advocate seeing private and public as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. Distinctions between public and private messages used to be so clear that we could distinguish between them by the type of medium used. Words written in a postmarked letter and addressed to a specific recipient were unequivocally private. But “tagging” someone in a Facebook post is a little more complicated. The message’s production style changes from one-to-one to a relative one-to-many. It’s not quite private because the message can be shared with hundreds of “friends,” but the nature of the closed network keeps it from being entirely public as well.³ “No content is ever either private or public, but potentially both, depending on who you are asking,” argues digital media scholar Malin Sveningsson Elm.⁴ Teenagers, for example, have developed a new definition of privacy. According to Sonia Livingstone’s in-depth interviews with teenagers about their social media habits, they display personal information that previous generations would have regarded as private (age, politics, income, religion, sexual preference, etc.). This is not to say they are wholly unconcerned with matters of privacy; they just view it differently. Unlike previous generations, the teenager’s definition of privacy is not tied to the disclosure of certain types of information but rather to having control over who knows what about them.⁵ A concern for military officials is that social media can present an impression of control that is not necessarily in line with the level of security the institution seeks to maintain.

Personal social media use by members of the armed forces, specifically US Marines, clashes with military culture in at least three primary ways. First, the military historically bases its freedom of expression policies on relatively uncomplicated notions of publicity and privacy, which hinge on the idea of an intended audience. Social media, of course, disrupt those formerly tidy distinctions with multilayered, semipublic, semiprivate, networked audiences. Second, the military is organized as a top-down hierarchy based on age, rank, and expertise. By contrast, social media are organized laterally as a network and present opportunity for multivocal participation. And finally, military culture actively seeks to diminish or eradicate a sense of self, whereas social media culture celebrates individual ego to the point that some call it narcissistic.⁶ The incongruities between military and social media culture present an opportunity to consider how individual social actors, in this case, US Marines, negotiate a network of pressures, expectations, traditions, conventions, and norms each time they operate online.

All communication technologies and cultures, to some extent, prescribe uses and behavior. And oftentimes their respective social codes overlap. When service members interact on social media, they invoke a collision of cultures.⁷ The culture of perpetual contact ushered in by social media technologies collides with an institution and, in the case of war, a context quintessentially associated with a lack of contact. It is important to examine the Marine Corps Social Media Guidance document because it represents a conscious effort to erect the confines in which Marines interact on social media. Moreover the context of military communication makes the case even more provocative and worthy of study because until recently the military focused almost exclusively on functional modes of communication—connecting planes to the ground, coordinating strikes and ambushes, and reporting needs to medics. But now social media use among military personnel (even in a theater of war) introduces a new and previously overlooked social dimension to information sharing that is forcing the DOD to reconsider existing strategies to manage access, uses, and content creation.⁸ The guidelines for behavior in the Marine Corps Social Media Guidance document are rather ambiguous, yet the consequences for misuse are serious. As a result, the policy shoulders individual Marines with the pressure and responsibility of self-monitoring and self-branding—activities that require a tremendous amount of time and emotional labor.

Because of the complex circumstances surrounding social media use in the military, the policy should be studied from historical, social, and cultural perspectives. Toward this end, my reading highlights the role of human agency in the creation and implementation of social media policy. An agential view holds that individuals are born into confines over which they have little control but that they are free to act within those confines.⁹ Studying the Marine Corps Social Media Guidance document from this perspective lends insight to the animating forces among institutions like the military and individual social actors like Marines as they attempt to manage contradictory cultural commitments. Or to put it differently, in what ways do military culture and institutional policies inform Marines’ storytelling power?

Historically Speaking: Free Speech in the Armed Forces

The policy that indicted former Marine sergeant Stein has been in effect since the Civil War. Restraints on free speech in the armed services derive from a need for rigid and thorough subordination to superior authorities, especially during times of crisis. According to legal scholar Detlev Vagts, “The armed forces are intimately allied with war and crisis, and war and crisis are closely tied to that clear and present danger to the national interest that calls forth and justifies restrictions on free speech.” Vagts goes on to point out, “A sad paradox requires that the serviceman sacrifice some of the liberties which he is called upon to protect.”¹⁰ The regulatory code limiting service members’ free speech is the UCMJ, a congressionally enacted code that establishes the basic machinery of the military criminal system.

The US Supreme Court grants the military wide latitude to restrict service members’ freedom of speech in matters pertaining to national security and military effectiveness. Thus, although the freedom of speech guarantee applies in theory to the military, in practice, command has the authority to narrowly construe its protections. Stein’s lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, tried to argue that the First Amendment protected his views. “The military may be different from the civilian world,” said San Diego ACLU legal director David Loy, “but it’s not exempt from the First Amendment. Sgt. Stein didn’t say anything for which the Marine Corps has any right to punish him.” Loy went on to argue, “He did not threaten order or discipline or take positions that anyone would attribute to the Corps.”¹¹ Yet the Supreme Court upheld the military’s position and dismissed Stein less than honorably from the Marine Corps.

Historically courts tend to rule in favor of the military in cases such as Stein’s because of the condition of crisis.¹² In 1972, the military punished a service member for publishing an on-base underground newspaper that protested military involvement in Vietnam. The court upheld the punishment, stating, “The military was well within its authority to punish a single serviceman for publishing his criticism of the armed forces because such words could lead to larger dissent within the troops.” Similarly in 1980, the Supreme Court favored the military again when a service member distributed petitions on base. The ruling stated that a service member’s freedom of speech “yields somewhat to meet certain overriding demands of discipline and duty.”¹³ Historically speaking, there are three statutory provisions explicitly regulating military expression.

For the most part, the three statutory provisions refer to in-person, or face-to-face, communication contexts. The first forbids “provoking words or gestures,” essentially interchanges between military personnel likely to cause an immediate breach of peace (i.e., drunken obscenities).¹⁴ The second also applies to face-to-face insults and contempt, penalizing “any person . . . who behaves with disrespect towards his superior officer.” According to Vagts, the Manual for Courts-Martial directed a restrictive administration of this clause, declaring that “it should not be used so as to hold one accountable for things said or done in ‘purely private conversation.’”¹⁵ The third provision prohibits contemptuous words against the president, vice president, Congress, secretary of defense, governor, or legislature of any state or territory. Although precedent for the third provision imagines circulation beyond an interpersonal encounter, it still assumes the utterance of such contemptuous remarks to be in the physical presence of others.

On its face, these rules are not entirely objectionable. In fact, they make sense within an institution and culture predicated on rank and file. However, the potential contexts for prohibited speech and behavior continue to expand with technological development. Mobile, internet, and social network communication makes it difficult to identify a “purely private conversation,” as many conversations occur beyond our physical contexts.

The wording of most military regulations is directed at “public” rather than “private” pronouncements. Delineations between the two are not explicit in the provisions. Instead their application appears to rely on a theoretical distinction between speech directed only at family and friends and speech that may have a wide and harmful impact. Simply put, the qualifications center on questions of dissemination and audience. In his sweeping analysis of military free speech, Vagts argues, “A gathering of more than a few individuals would be considered ‘public,’ particularly if they were not exclusively military personnel and more particularly if news correspondents were present.”¹⁶ A reference to news correspondents suggests a concern over dissemination. Yet the majority of UCMJ articles cited during Stein’s trial (articles 82, 88, 117, the general punitive article 134, and DOD directive 1344.10) do not explicitly address questions of publicity, circulation, audience, or dissemination. Rather, they imply these concerns by referencing particular types of media, namely, broadcast. For example, the DOD directive that ultimately convicted Stein includes a provision prohibiting his participation “in any radio, television, or other program or group discussion as an advocate for or against a partisan political party, candidate, or cause.”¹⁷ In other words, instead of addressing how social media complicates audience, dissemination, and visibility, Stein’s case ultimately centered on the quality of his activities themselves and whether or not they were “political” in nature.

Stein’s case is a productive entry point to discuss social media in the military because it presents (even in its lack) a framework for how the institution legally and culturally envisions appropriate and inappropriate social media activity. Prior to Stein, there was little legal precedent in military free speech cases regarding social media, especially as it applies to directive 1344. The most recent revision occurred in 2008, prompted by the popularity of online blogging. Although social media services experienced widespread success long before 2008, military regulation and legal precedent often lag behind technological advancement. As a result, military justice compared Stein’s Facebook activities to provisions regarding participation in public rallies, the dissemination of printed materials, or an appearance on television or radio.

Prior to services like YouTube and Facebook, blogging was the internet activity that prompted the DOD to revise regulation. Early on during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior levels...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Military Abbreviations
• Introduction: New Faces of War
• 1. Incongruities across Social Media and Military Cultures
• 2. From Posting Mail to Posting Status
• 3. Photos from the Field
• 4. Marine Corps Video Memes
• Conclusion: This Means War
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover