One concrete example of this emerged within days of the Israel Defense Forces launching what they called Operation Pillar of Defense (which came complete with its own Twitter hashtag). According to several reports, the Israeli army asked citizens not to post the details of attacks or troop movements on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram because they might inadvertently reveal the location of specific targets. One political blog that was briefed by the IDF as part of its media strategy wrote:

“Bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook friends of Israel were reminded by our IDF contacts not to say exactly where rockets have landed or even when/where alert sirens have blared… The siren and landing reports are helping the terrorists hone their aim, making it a bit easier to target/kill civilians.

It’s one thing to say the troops are building outside of Gaza, and its something totally different reporting that you saw a tank moving down main street at 3pm… that information can tell Hamas where (and when) a land action may be coming.”

Information flow has been democratized

Anyone over a certain age or with a knowledge of military history will no doubt see the similarities between this and the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” propaganda campaigns of World War II, which warned citizens of the U.S. and other Allied countries that spreading specific information about military attacks could threaten the war effort. But that was aimed at a much smaller phenomenon — namely, people talking to others who might have connections to the military. Now, anyone with a smartphone is capable of publishing not just a few sparse details about an attack but specific longitude and latitude co-ordinates, images, video and more.

Think about what happened when the U.S. Navy Seals targeted Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan: a computer programmer named Sohaib Athar spent a couple of hours live-tweeting details of that attack without even knowing what he was doing. If the Navy had been involved in a more prolonged attack, those details could have easily helped Al-Qaeda determine how many troops were involved, what types of aircraft, what kinds of weapons, and much more. That kind of data can change the nature of a military campaign, especially when combined with “big data”-style algorithms and mapping technology that is now commonplace.

Every war is now a social-media war

And while the Israeli military may think that it is somehow controlling the flow of information with its live-blog or its Twitter account or its Tumblr propaganda campaign, it is just one stream in a giant ocean of data flowing from individuals who are both observing and participating in the attacks — including soldiers who are posting photos of themselves to Instagram and Facebook, pictures of drone missions that are being aggregated through a site called Dronestagram, and many other similar examples. Everything that is geo-tagged becomes a potential source of crucial information about the Israeli action and the response by Hamas.

Part of my interest in this phenomenon is just the way that the media we use helps shape the world around us, but I’m also fascinated because my father was a Canadian Air Force officer who worked with NATO on designing what are called “command-and-control systems,” including the military version of modern information theory — in other words, figuring out how information flows can affect military strategy.

In the not-so-distant past, crucial information flowed primarily from the top down, and battlefield data was hard to accumulate or distribute efficiently, apart from the usual word of mouth and rumor-mongering engaged in by soldiers. The internet and social tools have altered that structure significantly, however, despite the military’s best efforts to regulate them. And during a real-time campaign, social media may be a great way of distributing the government’s marketing message about the conflict, but it’s also a great way for anyone involved to publish what could be critical details of an attack — and that is difficult, if not impossible, to defend against.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

One of the most obvious examples of this occurred very early in the attack, when the Israel Defence Forces’ official Twitter account posted a tweet that warned Hamas leaders not to “show their faces above ground” because the army was about to launch missiles into their area of the Gaza Strip. This arguably qualifies as a direct and specific threat of violence, which is against Twitter’s terms of service — but so far the tweet remains, and the IDF account has not been sanctioned (there were some reports that it had been suspended, but those appeared to involve another unrelated account). In fact, the IDF account is marked as officially “verified” by Twitter.

We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

—
IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

When does Twitter decide to block content?

So far, Twitter hasn’t responded to a request for comment on how it is handling the Israeli conflict and the fact that it is playing out live on the network — complete with photos of rocket attacks, burned-out buildings and even dead bodies (I’ll update this post if and when Twitter responds). The company has often spoken of its responsibility as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” but for the most part that has involved promoting the rights of individual users in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests, not the interests of governments and armies.

Arguably, Israel would be well within its rights to ask Twitter to remove or censor tweets by Hamas, which is defined by the Israeli government as a terrorist organization. If Twitter has selectively censored tweets by Nazi sympathizers after a request from the German government — using the new powers it introduced earlier this year — then how would it justify not giving Israel the same ability to block Hamas tweets, or filter them based on certain geographical limits?

And it’s not just Twitter, of course: the Israeli army has been uploading videos of rocket attacks to YouTube as the campaign has been unfolding, and some are fairly graphic — including one that blew up a car carrying the head of the Hamas military wing. That video was removed Thursday morning by YouTube, and it appeared that the site might have decided it breached their terms of service, but then the company said it had removed the video by mistake and it was reinstated.

Threats of violence and shocking images are also something that Facebook has been known to remove, but for now at least the network says it won’t be removing content posted by the Israel Defense Forces — which includes an app that curates photos from Instagram, many of which the army said were taken on the ground during its attack on the Gaza Strip.

Our new information gatekeepers are inscrutable

But according to Mike Isaac of All Things Digital, the Facebook spokesperson he heard from didn’t say why the content from the Israel Defense Forces was being left up, or under what circumstances it might be taken down — leaving the question open of what Facebook would see as offensive content in the context of a war. And that reinforces the same problem that has arisen before with Facebook and other similar social networks as a platform for speech: namely, they are effectively a series of black boxes when it comes to decision-making around what gets removed.

When YouTube removed the initial IDF video, it wasn’t clear whether that was an editorial decision or one made in error by an algorithm. When Facebook deletes accounts belonging to Arab women who are fighting for their rights, it isn’t surprising that this is seen by some as censorship, even when it might just be an errant algorithm. And while Google and Twitter both put up lists of the requests they get from officials, the reality is that they remove or filter out plenty of content and never mention it. And when Google selectively blocks a video like “The Innocence of Muslims,” there is no court of appeal that will hear arguments about that decision.

So while it’s a great thing to have all these sources of information — assuming that you believe more information is better, even if it is coming from the communications branch of the army — it is almost all being hosted by proprietary services (although the IDF also has an active blog where it has been posting live updates and even infographics). And while they have all expressed their commitment to free speech in some form or another, they have absolutely no obligation to uphold that, or to tell users when information has been removed, or why.

We may have disrupted our old information gatekeepers — newspapers, television, even governments — but in many ways we have just exchanged them for shiny new ones. And they are just as inscrutable, if not more so.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi