As the military expanded opportunities for women in combat roles in 2015, the service was initially opposed to that change. Overall, the Marines remains an overwhelmingly male force at only about 8 percent female. While social media misconduct is a department-wide problem, the Marine Corps has come under specific scrutiny in the wake of Marines United. Last summer, a new Personnel Studies and Oversight Office was created in the Marine Corps to 'identify opportunities for long-term changes to improve unit cohesion,' the Marines said. So far, 55 Marines have been held accountable for online social media misconduct, to include courts-martial, administrative separation, non-judicial punishment, and adverse administrative action. Twenty-two of those individuals were civilians outside DoD jurisdiction, while 101 were active-duty or reserve Marines. The new statutory authority, called the 'Wrongful broadcast or distribution of intimate visual images,' helps DoD hold accountable service members who engage in misconduct, a spokesperson told ABC News.įollowing the discovery of the Marines United Facebook page last year, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service ( NCIS) scanned nearly 131,000 images across more than 168 social media sites and investigated at least 123 persons with reported involvement in the incident, the Marine Corps said Friday.

Military services control their own social media policies, but a change to the Fiscal Year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which became law in December, allowed Congress to enact a new criminal offense for the military. 'The DoD works closely with our social media partners to monitor platforms and flag any malicious, abusive or terrorist related content,' said Tiffany Miller, Office of the Secretary of Defense Acting Director for Digital Media and Strategy.

If we find a violation, we take down the content and, when appropriate, take other measures such as banning the content and/or reporting to law enforcement.'Ī Department of Defense spokesperson told ABC News over the weekend that the Pentagon was aware of reports of the Dropbox link. 'As always, we investigate reports of content that violate our Acceptable Use Policy. 'This link has been taken down and banned so it cannot be recirculated on Dropbox,' the company said in a statement on Friday.

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