As the war in Ukraine is still unfolding, the social media buzz around the war is also unfolding. In the 21st century, the war no longer need to be purely manifested in physical form, but social media also plays an important role in the intelligence gathering aspect. (As seen in a news article provided by Wired). The article claims that after “Chechenya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, posted a short video on Telegram in which a cheery beard soldier stood before a line of tanks clanking down a road under overcast sky” (Wired), a french company was able to identify the soldier in the video via public face recognition services. This is an interesting development that we see in modern war, as the individual’s identity is no longer exclusive to military or private individuals (as pointed out in Wired). Now it is open to the public and anyone can pretty much access the same “military grade” softwares. Aside from this one instance whereby individuals can be identified via facial recognition, a few days ago, a reddit post had been making rounds around the internet. The post is below.
In the Image, a redditor posted a picture of his friend in a safe house in Ukraine (Link Here). According to the article explanation, the redditor posted this image to garner “upvotes” on reddit, however, the redditor did not contemplate the consequences of Russian intelligence and even individuals exposing the ukrainian safe-houses. This post is rather sad, and I could not find its validity, but such events have happened in the past before whereby the public social media user can seemingly contribute/participate in war. In fact, back in 2010, after a 4chan post leaked images and co-ordinates of a terrorist “training camp” to Russian intelligence, airstrikes were called and the camps were destroyed in a matter of days after being built. (more info here) Regardless, this social media participation, where anonymous and public users can participate in war is one that is definitely of concern and characteristic of the modern decade.
Great writing in this piece, very unbiased presentation of the facts. Having digested it, this is so incredibly sad - a simple post should not have the ability to literally kill people. But, sadly, in the world we live in today it is possible and it just happened. While it was idiotic of the friend to post said picture, the blood should lie on the hands of Facebook. Nobody should be able to track the origination address of a post unless it was intentional - a MAJOR issue that must be fixed.
Thank you for exposing some serious truth in this article. I was so surprised by this unfortunate and awful event that happened as a result of an intelligence breach within Ukraine's soldier community and tactics. As a Ukrainian American I've noticed that there's a lot of strange corruption going on with this war and have been surprised with a few events relating to social media and the war. The president of Ukraine actually re-released his show on Netflix during all of this...which is a bit strange considering that his acting career should be his last focus. Weird stuff. Thanks for getting me thinking about more of these things going on.
I do think your statement that "where anonymous and public users can participate in war is one that is definitely of concern and characteristic of the modern decade." is so true. War has never been like this before with the way we use and abuse technology. I think in some ways too people think social media and posts like these are seemingly private, but people have other ways to spread public information now. No one is really "safe" on the internet.
This is certainly a very interesting phenomenon in modern warfare. While the validity of 4chan posts like your example are often up for debate, I have no doubts such an event could occur today as militaries slowly try to adapt to rapidly evolving internet technology. Even just the fact that we in the west can see phone recordings of the invasion in real time is ridiculous in contrast to wars of the past that relied on strictly word of mouth communications. Makes you wonder if any major strategical developments will occur as a result as in this 4chan post.