Data Management

Air Force Used Twitter To Monitor Outrage

Mitch Wagner, California Bureau Chief, Light Reading

August 12, 2009

4 Min Read

After Air Force One scared the bejeepers out of New Yorkers by flying low over the city to stage a photo opp, the Air Force used Twitter and other social media to monitor the public backlash. The Air Force's work is an example of how government agencies can use Twitter and other social media as a barometer for public opinion.Not that the effort did much good in the New York incident. "No positive spin is possible," according to a PowerPoint chart that was part of a newly-released package of government documents.

According to the Air Force One documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, a unit called the Combat Information Cell at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida monitored the public fallout from the April 27 flight and offered recommendations for dealing with the fast-breaking story.
Formed two years ago, the cell is made up of as many as nine people who analyze piles of data culled from the Internet and other sources to determine whether the Air Force's message is being heard.
The presidential plane took off for New York from Andrews Air Force in Maryland accompanied by two F-16 jet fighters. The purpose of the flight, which wasn't publicly announced, was to get new photos of the specially modified Boeing 747 with the statue in the background.
The mission quickly became a public relations disaster as panicked New Yorkers, fearing another 9/11-style attack, emptied office buildings. In the aftermath, Louis Caldera, director of the White House military office that authorized the flight, was fired.
The Combat Information Cell's first assessment of the event said "Web site blog comments 'furious' at best." Local reporting of the flyover was "very critical, highlighting scare factor," it added.

Twitter users posted an average of one message per minute about a pair of F-16s chasing a commercial airliner.

Media coverage over the next 24 hours "will focus on local hysteria and lack of public notification," the [Air Force's team] predicted. "Blogs will continue to be overwhelmingly negative."

The team recommended that there was very little the Air Force could do about the situation but hunker down and wait for the outrage to pass. The team "recommended acknowledging the mistake and ensuring it didn't happen again."

Social media can be a powerful too for engaging with the public. But, like any powerful tool, it can be dangerous when used wrong. John Verdi, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the government needs to guard against accessing private data under false pretenses.

Privacy is, indeed, a big concern on social media. Twitter postings are, by default, public, but some users may not be aware of that and might feel burned if their messages get out to unintended places. Even Twitter streams that are set to private occasionally leak out to the public. And Facebook offers a myriad options for making data public, private, or accessible to just a small group of people. A government IT worker accessing information on social media might stumble across information that was intended to be private, even if the government IT worker did nothing wrong.

For an example of how privacy concerns can be a problem on social media: President Obama turned to the Internet and social media to win support for his healthcare reform plan, but opponents criticized him when he asked supporters to let him know about misrepresentations.

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn is taking issue with a Tuesday posting on the official White House blog in which the Obama administration asks supporters to report back when they receive "an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy" to an official e-mail address: [email protected].
"I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed 'fishy' or otherwise inimical to the White House's political interests," Cornyn writes today in a harshly worded letter to President Barack Obama in which he asks the president to immediately halt the effort.

And, despite the Air Force use of social media to gather information about public opinion, the Marine Corps banned Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites for up to a year, citing security concerns. Other branches of the military are considering doing the same.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on leading-edge government IT -- and how the technology involved may end up inside your business. Download the report here (registration required).

Follow InformationWeek on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn:

Twitter: @InformationWeek @IWpremium @MitchWagner