Proposed legislation now being considered by Russia's Duma would attempt to bring to an end a particular practice among members of Russia's armed forces that has become something of a diplomatic and tactical thorn in the military's side—the posting of photos and other information on social media that gives away the operations and positions of their units.

The draft bill states that "servicemen are prohibited to place in mass media, and the Internet information (including photos, video, geolocation data and other information) about yourself and other servicemen disclosing the department they belong to, information about their official activities or service activities of other military personnel, the activities of military units, organizations and units in which they perform military service, and their place of deployment, except for cases provided for by regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation."

In an explanatory note, the bill's authors stated:

Analysis of the activities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, other troops, military formations and bodies, including in the course of their application in the Syrian Arab Republic, showed that military servicemen are of particular interest to the security services of certain countries, terrorist and extremist organizations. Information posted by military servicemen on the Internet or mass media is used for information or psychological influence, as well, in particular cases, to form a biased assessment of the Russian Federation’s state policy.

You might think this would be something that the military itself would handle through internal discipline. However, the Russian military only issued guidelines in 2017 suggesting troops turn off geolocation on their mobile devices—guidelines that have been routinely ignored. As a result, the Russian military has repeatedly been embarrassed by social media posts that have not only been used to prove Russia's operations in Eastern Ukraine and Syria but have exposed details of training exercises, including the current Vostok 2018 exercise (currently heavily tagged on Instagram).

Perhaps the most public example of social media operational security fails involved Sanya Sotkin, a Russian Army signal corps noncommissioned officer who posted geotagged selfies of himself in his armored communications vehicle from within Ukraine in 2014—while the Russian government was actively denying that Russian troops had deployed into eastern Ukraine. Other social media posts to Instagram with geotagging revealed that Spetznatz special forces were operating in the Donetsk People’s Republic—the name that Russians and secessionists have given to the separatists' territory in eastern Ukraine. Soldiers who received medals for their service in Ukraine posted photos of their awards, and troops wounded in operations posted photos of their recovery—and of visits from Ministry of Defense officials. And there were also posts that revealed that about 40 Russian paratroopers had been killed in action in Ukraine.

The information about the deaths of Russian servicemen in Ukraine was so embarrassing that Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an executive order classifying all information about the deaths of members of the military in peacetime, declaring them a state secret.

Social media posts also provided evidence that the missile launcher that downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 came from Russia and have provided both foreign governments and non-governmental observers such as online intelligence collaboration Bellingcat with a wealth of open-source intelligence on Russian operations in Ukraine and Syria.