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Comment by umarcyber | Hacker News Reader

I'm sitting here wondering why the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force has an Instagram account to begin with. I understand it's the office itself, but still don't see the reason to expand the attack surface of government offices. X makes sense, Instagram, I'm not so sure as much

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I see no difference between X and Instagram in this regard whatsoever.

Think NASA, for example; it's also a government agency, and they are doing great job posting photos in Instagram, do you think anything is wrong with it?

It is just bizzare when you take a step back and remember the world 20 years ago. NASA would just post directly to their own website. Of course they would. Now imagine you go back in time 20 years ago and say "What if we took all these images you are providing for the public on their dime, compressed the hell out of them, and served them in this for profit proprietary marketing/propaganda app instead?" Engineers in 2006 would have probably looked at you like you had three heads. The question would make no sense back then.

Something to think about when we consider what is "normal" today. Not much really is normal. We've been beaten to think it is.

I feel that this is somewhat orthogonal. Yes, some questionable things have happened that made the ways how people exchange information be controlled by a handful of corporations.* But for NASA specifically, this is not relevant. They were not the ones who forced people to go to social networks; they needed to go there because this is where their audience was.

* On that note, and for the sake of the argument, I would say that the years of free uncontrolled information exchange in the Internet can probably be considered an exception. Information exchange was always controlled by governments and businesses (e.g. TV and newspapers) before, just as it is now. The fact that you or I don't like it does not change that this is how it used to be before the Internet appeared as a "free space". My generation was lucky to see how great the world with free information exchange could be, but I don't have much hope that it would stay like that for long.

I'll note that for most purposes the canonical NASA image repository is on Flickr, and it seems like NASA pays to have it ad-free for viewers.

I think one has historically been more text based vs image based. so for comms, i think X makes more sense. Space Force is under DoD so funding not much an issue. NASA, not so much. They have to fight for every nickle they get, so appealing to audiences via images/videos makes sense. I'm more so questioning why HE needed an account, instead of just the organization. Like Space Force posting makes more sense than him using it. I think what you're getting at is that the medium of communication has changed to social media. I get that. I just think it expands the attack surface for that org. Just have one account and post through that

Outreach, I'd guess? You've got to do outreach where the people are. X and Instagram have pretty different audiences, but they're both large, so if you're on one you probably should be on both.

Why does X make sense? It makes no sense at all to me. X is the least logical place to put it.

It's not really an attack surface though. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/932/

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