Accessible, Transparent, Progressive: Conceptualising the Militarisation of Digital Space Through the Social Media Presence of Arms Manufacturers

Abstract

Arms sales cause serious harm and the public is – on some level – aware of this, yet their sale continues apace. Militarisation is the engendering of support for war, broadly understood, and this includes the manufacture/sale of weapons. This article examines the Twitter feeds of three large US arms manufacturers: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman (as part of a larger project where approximately 900 tweets were examined). It argues that productive tensions of exposure (knowing) and revelation (societal acknowledgement) engender militarisation within arms manufacturers’ Twitter feeds. It finds that arms manufacturers represent themselves as accessible/transparent through regular updates and high volumes of information. They also distract from the violence of their products by presenting themselves as drivers of human progress, which occurs in social, environmental and technological dimensions. Taken as a whole, the representations of accessibility and distracting content on social media function to facilitate the arms trade in this case.