Tweet, Tweet: You’re Dead

This is certainly a first. Late last week the Kenyan military took to Twitter to warn Somali towns of an imminent offensive against al-Shabab. From the Al-Jazeera article which was one of the first to cover the story:

Major Emmanuel Chirchir, the Kenyan military spokesman, said on his Twitter account that residents of Baidoa, Baadheere, Baydhabo, Dinsur, Afgoye, Bwale, Barawe, Jilib, Kismayo and Afmadow that their towns are under imminent attack.

Chirchir said that anyone with relatives and friends in the towns should be advised accordingly.

The Kenyan military said that it will attack 10 Somali towns where it believes al-Shabab has a presence and advised civilians to stay away from al-Shabab camps or being used as conduits for weapons.

Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste, speaking from Nairobi, said that while it is not unusual for the Kenyan government to make such warnings before attacks, the use of social media to do so is, however, something novel.

Bringing social media into protocol “advance warning” by a government has interesting implications for the future of civilian casualties in conventional warfare. Customary international humanitarian law makes it clear that the attacking force should give such a warning before an assault which may have civilian ramifications. “Effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit,” is what the Geneva Conventions officially say.

These standards aren’t new, obscure, or hippy-dippy; advance warning through traditional methods has been standard practice even before 20th century warfare. In modern times it was first codified in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 “Lieber Code”: “Commanders, whenever admissible, inform the enemy of their intention to bombard a place, so that the noncombatants, and especially the women and children, may be removed before the bombardment commences.” But in Lincoln’s days (when it was prudent, of course) these commanders would send a messenger to a town on horseback to warn a centralized local figure; villagers wouldn’t get a pop-up in their inbox letting them know directly. While improvements to this practice came over time with the adoption of radio, television, and Internet, a “middleman” has always held some sort of role in advance warning.

The use of social media by governments to carry out advance warning effectively cuts out this middleman, a shift which is certainly a step in the right direction. When information doesn’t have to be filtered through a chain of command, reaction time can be reduced and lives may ultimately be saved. The egalitarian essence of public information like this also ensures, at least on its face, that no single group will be excluded from receiving it.

But the official use of social media to warn civilians of military offensives may not be all rainbows and butterflies. One unsettling possibility is that a public broadcast runs the risk of endorsing hatred and violence against the target. It is not difficult to imagine the role social media would have played in the Rwandan genocide, where Hutu radio and print media fueled killings through hate speech and direct calls to action. If the climate was right, an initial government advance warning tweet might signal an offensive among a country’s own citizens towards a minority population.

Regardless of its potential for “good” or “evil”, one thing is for sure here: the social media explosion is changing the way we do absolutely everything.