Patty Nieberg
When trash bins overflowed at Fort Liberty and continued to pile up for weeks last winter, soldiers at the North Carolina Army base sent photos to a soldier-run Instagram account to highlight the unsightly issue. Comments flooded in, many of them jokes at the Army’s expense. Within days of that initial social media post, which prompted news coverage, base officials responded and the garbage was removed.
The de facto smoke pit of the digital era, social media in the military has long been a gathering place for service members and veterans. But it’s also a tool of last resort for rank-and-file troops who feel that the only way to fix a problem they’re facing is to post about it publicly and break with a longstanding cultural norm in the military to keep issues in-house.
The Army, as an institution, has seen social media as a crucial recruiting tool in recent years, but when it comes to how the branch uses these platforms to engage with its own members, some current and former soldiers say the strategy is unclear at best and adversarial at worst. Recently, Army leaders have been reluctant to embrace newer forms of media as a way to receive feedback from soldiers. Instead, the preference, and oft-repeated talking point, has been that soldiers should run their problems through their chain of command.
Where Army leaders are missing the mark, critics say, is in not asking why some soldiers today feel they need to raise these concerns in online forums like Reddit, or community pages on Facebook and Instagram, and on other platforms and apps.
Communities like U.S Army W.T.F! Moments, whose Facebook page boasts a digital audience of 1.6 million followers and more than 2 million daily viewers, and the Army and Military Reddit forums, with audiences of 315,000 and 488,000 members, respectively, “would not be needed if the official channels worked,” said Ken Ramos, a retired psychological operations sergeant major and admin for U.S Army W.T.F! Moments.
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