The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recently released its first department-wide social media policy detailing how DoD military and civilian personnel should use official social media accounts.
“It’s long overdue,” Office of the Secretary of Defense Director of Digital Media Andy Oare said. “There have been efforts in the past to do this, but in an organization of this size and magnitude, you need to fully coordinate and ensure all viewpoints are heard and represented. We wanted to make sure the services were collaborators from the very beginning.”
The guidance seeks to advance the military’s mission while further instilling trust in the DoD’s credibility. “Official Use of Social Media for Public Affairs Purposes” provides principles for social media use within DoD, direction regarding records management procedures for social media accounts, and guidelines ensuring personal social media accounts are not misrepresented or misinterpreted as official accounts.
“Social media has an effect on every one of our service members, civilians, contractors, and their families — whether they run an official account or have never heard of Twitter,” Oare said. “We owe it to all of them to have one central policy that provides a clearly articulated standard of operation and accountability.”
The social media policy applies to the Office of the Secretary of Defense personnel, the military departments, the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff, the combatant commands, and other DoD offices and agencies, according to the DoD.
“We deliberately wrote it in a collaborative manner, and it encourages component heads to continue establishing component-specific social media regulations,” Oare said. “Our aim is not to be prescriptive or restrictive, but rather to lay out some common sense rules that simply have not been formally articulated at this level.”