Anecdotes and Evidence

"Social Media Monitoring of Athletes on the Rise"

Evidence: 

While colleges have long monitored their athletes’ comments, the rise of social media – and Twitter and Facebook in particular – have raised new concerns for major college sports programs.  Several universities have hired a private company to monitor the social media websites of their athletes.

"The Pac-10 conference does not have a policy for social media, but it allows individual universities to enact their own policies. At the University of Washington, head coaches set their own policies for social media, according to a UW source."

Anecdote:

“Guess What?” wrote Thomas, who has more than 13,000 Twitter followers. “It’s freaking snowing in this GHOST town man… Damn!”

It was a harmless comment, but by game time on Jan. 30, students at Washington State University had read the Tweet, and were ready to heckle the Husky point guard throughout the game. After the Cougars’ 87-80 win, several logged onto Twitter and sent messages back to Thomas.