In a recent story from the Louisville Courier-Journal, both the Kentucky and Louisville athletic programs hire outside firms to monitor the social networking behavior of its student athletes.
In information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, UK student athletes are required to use a program from Centrix Service, an outside monitoring firm that flags more than 400 words from their Twitter, Facebook or other social media platorms. Of those 400+ words, 370 of which are names of sports agents. Louisville uses similar technology from UDilligence.
The range of words flagged by the programs range from the obvious, such as “Muslim” or “Arab” or “fight” (which could be used in many connotations in the sports world) to hard-hitting terms like “white power”, “rape” or “nazi” or “murder”. Lousville’s service is similar, including the terms “beer bong”, “Mr. Brownstone” or “bazongas”.
Predictably, some liken this to oppression of free speech. Bradley Shear, a Washington, DC-based attorney and digital media expert, went so far as to call the practice “clearly unconstitutional”.
“This is just an online bug, there’s no difference. It’s so troubling beyond words.”
William Sharp, staff attorney for the Kentucky chapter of the ACLU, shared similar sentiments.
“When students are forced, as a condition of receiving a scholarship, to grant government officials access to all of their social networking accounts and then are subject to punishment for engaging in lawful speech that the university simply doesn’t like, we believe public universities cross the line.”
While those in the media and civil rights fields may find this to be a violation of rights, most student athletes are accepting of the practice.
Muhammed Saisullah, a junior walk-on for the Kentucky football program, considers it a way to keep student athletes accountable for their actions.
““I feel like it’s OK for (the coach) to monitor (student athletes) to make sure they’re not representing the university in a bad way. Monitoring, I think it’s pretty smart.”
To read the entire article, follow the link: [URL]http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120820/RSS0702/308200042/University-Kentucky-Louisville-forbid-athletes-from-using-hundreds-Twitter-words?gcheck=1&nclick_check=1[/URL]
