There’s been a lot written about how the Israeli army has been using social media to broadcast the details of its latest military campaign against Hamas — live-tweeting rocket attacks, uploading YouTube videos of hits on specific victims, aggregating Instagram photos from the battlefield, and even posting infographics to a Tumblr blog. This obviously has marketing and propaganda value, but that isn’t the only way this modern media campaign is changing the nature of military strategy: since social-media tools are inherently difficult to regulate and are multi-directional in nature, they can be a very dangerous double-edged sword, and we are only beginning to see the full repercussions of that.

One concrete example of this emerged within days of the Israel Defense Forces launching what they called Operation Pillar of Defense (which came complete with its own Twitter hashtag). According to several reports, the Israeli army asked citizens…