Think you hate selfies? The Russian military might ban them.
Russian soldiers may soon be saying goodbye to their Snapchats.
According to the BBC, the Russian Ministry of Defense, which manages and regulates Russia's armed forces, has drafted a law that would ban soldiers and military personnel from posting on social media. The ban is expected to take effect in January 2018.
The ban comes, according to the bill, in the name of national security. Social media posts have, in the past, revealed Russian military details to enemy combatants, the bill claims. For example, in 2015, a Vice reporter was famously able to use a soldier's series of selfies to confirm Russia's military involvement in the eastern Ukraine.
The plan is also meant to prevent Russia's enemy combatants from tracking the source of social media posts using geolocation. Tweets, for example, can be linked to their GPS coordinates through multiple methods, even if their authors have Tweet Location disabled.
The Ministry of Defense is not the first Russian government agency to take this step. The Ministry told the BBC that Russia's FSB, the spy agency formerly known as the KGB, also restricts its staff's social media content.
And the move shouldn't come as a surprise. 50,000 employees of Russian companies co-owned by the state recently received smartphones designed to keep apps from tracking any user activity. And last year, the Kremlin banned LinkedIn, allegedly to protect users' privacy.
The Kremlin now, it seems, views social media as a threat not only to privacy, but to national security.
Monica wrote for Mashable's Tech section with a focus on retail, internet of things, and the intersections of technology and social justice. She holds a degree in creative writing from Brown University, and has previously written for Dow Jones Media, the New York Post, Yahoo Finance, and others. In her free time, she can be found attempting to cook Asian food, buying board games, and looking for new hobbies.
