Sentiment of Armed Forces Social Media Accounts in the United Kingdom: An Initial Analysis of Twitter Content

A Comparative Study of Military Communication on Instagram: A Research Note

“…The sample is composed of the posts throughout 2021 (January 1–December 31) of @australianarmy ( n = 334), @usarmy ( n = 473), @ejercitodetierra ( n = 331), @armee2terre ( n = 316), and @idf ( n = 468). Following inclusion criteria identified in other studies (Leightley et al, 2020; Smolicz, 2018), accounts had to be verified, public, and belong to military organizations. The selection includes countries with differentiated defense policies, in some cases military forces are a direct tool of national power (France, the United States, and Israel Defense Forces (IDF)) while in others their policies are dependent on external agreements (Spain and Australia).…”

“…Instagram dynamics force users to select from preestablished categories to classify their posts, introducing their bias and prejudices in the communication process (Choi & Lewallen, 2018). The main instrument is the hashtag (#) that summarizes narratives and joins the main topics of the post (Leightley et al, 2020; Radzikowski et al, 2016). The use of the hashtag allows the classification of the post, capturing the essential content and increasing the dissemination among users.…”

“…The data were collected through computational techniques (Giglietto et al, 2012), using Python programming language to download information on posts by web scraping. The data were later analyzed by quantitative methods used in other social media studies (Kolliakou et al, 2016; Leightley et al, 2020; Pérez-Pérez et al, 2019; Sewalk et al, 2018). The information was classified through an inductive process into categories based on scientific literature.…”

Determinants of users’ engagement with official military Instagram accounts

“…Social media allows armies to control the narrative and the flow of information, replacing traditional media as a mediator, and playing an especially relevant role when it comes to consequences of operations such as casualties or accidents (Forster, 2006). In addition to informational purposes, armies also use social media to increase recruitment and retention (Leightley et al, 2020), as well as for justifying military operations in national territory and expeditionary deployments (Dandeker, 2009).…”

“…Previous studies have identified trends in the institutional communications of European armies (Olson et al, 2016), the Swedish Armed Forces (Deverell, 2015) and Israel Defense Forces (Cunningham, 2015;Golan and Ben-Ari, 2018). Other research has examined the activity of military organizations on Twitter, focusing on the British Army (Leightley, 2020) and the IDF (Stern & Ben-Shalom, 2021). YouTube has been another arena of military communication, which has been exploited by both the US Army (Christensen, 2008) and the Canadian Armed Forces (Mirrles, 2015).…”