Facebook Launches Crisis Tools for Military Service Members

A new Facebook program provides military personnel, veterans and their families with customized resources when their content is flagged as harmful or suicidal.
It is an extension of a suicide prevention effort Facebook launched in December, which lets friends alert the social network when other users express suicidal thoughts by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook sends an email with suicide prevention resources to the author of the comment.
“While this is helpful for a military family, there are several specific resources provided to our nation’s military that we wanted to make sure they were aware of at their time of need,” military support organization Blue Star Families, which along with the Department of Veterans Affairs partnered with Facebook for the effort, wrote in a statement.
Facebook engineers developed a way to help identify military members and their families, and it will now send them military specific resources such as The Veterans Crisis Line when their content is flagged.

In a survey of 2,891 military family members by Blue Star Families, about 10% said they had considered suicide and 9% said they knew a service member who had contemplated suicide.
When they were asked what military leaders should do concerning the issue, the most common response (23%) cited the need to eradicate the stigma that still surrounds seeking mental health support or counseling.
“Indeed, many comments mentioned leaders telling military members to ‘suck it up,’ or ‘soldier up,’” write the authors of the study.
With 86% of military families on Facebook saying they use the service daily, it makes sense for the network to serve as a private referrer to military-focused suicide prevention resources.

11:00 by Robert dawne · 0

Army Warns Of Danger Of Geotagging

While for an ordinary civilian the automatic geotagging of your photos or check-ins might be convenient, in the military it can be a lethal mistake. In 2007, geotagged photos of a new fleet of helicopters allowed enemy forces to mortar the base and destroy several of them; it could just as easily have been a field hospital or barracks.
The Army has therefore published an article calling attention to this fact, though its casual tone suggests that they aren’t ready to take serious action on the issue. A warning is all it is, and perhaps also an acknowledgement that sometimes it’s better to bend with the breeze than fight it.
While soldiers in the field aren’t likely to be checking in to engagements or taking pictures of their fortifications for the kids, such things are still going to happen. Whether it’s enlisted personnel or people like embedded journalists, DoD researchers, civilian contractors, or what have you, the risk of someone posting sensitive information is real. And with the speed of sharing today, such data can propagate rapidly enough that it’s a serious security risk.
The army’s power to control the devices used by its soldiers and those around them is limited. And any attempt at locational lockdown would almost certainly end in failure. Luckily, it can still minimize the risk by making social media part of a soldier’s situational awareness. It’s a testament to the power and reach of social media that it should be entered into tactical calculations.
And while location sharing is framed primarily as a risk today, it’s obvious from the military’s pursuit of smartphones as an integral part of a soldier’s equipment that they value it as a potential asset as well.

13:38 by Robert dawne · 0