Lawyer CLAY TRAVIS posted an important topic on Fanhouse.
He asks whether NCAA College athletes should be required to set their Facebook accounts to “private”. Or ban them outright as Kent State tried to do before reversing the decision after public outcry.
Virtually every college athlete in the country is on Facebook now. This makes sense, it’s hard not to be on Facebook if you’re under 35, impossible if you’re under 25. But Facebook has become a public relations minefield for major athletic programs across the country. Whether it’s players being kicked out of school for making a threat in their status message (Wake Forest), posting racist comments about the newly elected President (Texas), setting off an internet firestorm over whether or not you actually posted messages on another person’s wall (Georgia) or just having your idiotic responses to quizzes posted all over for others to enjoy (Michigan). This is just the tip of the Facebook iceberg, every program is in danger at every moment of every day. All of this attention and all of this danger raises an intriguing question: Is it time for athletic departments to ban their athletes from having social media profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and the like?
This week the University of Arizona took action to combat the dangers of Facebook, announcing that all of their athletes in every sport must set their profiles to private. Setting the profile to private means that only those people you select as friends can see your profile. Otherwise the profile remains visible to the entire network (generally your college). How serious is Arizona about the new policy? Athletes who don’t comply risk losing their scholarships if their online conduct fails to “reflect the high standards of honor and dignity” expected by the school. …
read the entire article – Time for Colleges to Ban Facebook?
As a blogger, I believe in free speach online.
But as a coach, Facebook worries me tremendously. It’s going to cause a lot of grief for a lot of kids for many years into the future.
I’d support any athletic program that requires privacy. Here’s Kristina Baskett’s private Facebook account, for example.
An outright ban of Facebook is going too far, IMHO.
Leave a comment if you have an opinion. There are some GREAT comments posted already.
14 comments ↓
seriously though who doesnt have their FB on private? it would be stupid to leave your porfile open, thats inviting all the creepers and peepers to come after you.
College students aren’t worried about creepers and peepers.
Facebook hit the crapper when it opened itself up to non-college students. That may sound elitist, but I don’t mean it as a college v. non-college thing. I mean it because once it allowed high school students and non students, the college-email requirement disappeared, and anyone could get online. Then the explosion happened.
FB was big on campuses before it went super-national, but those people who used it in the early years (yes, me, my sophomore year it was still in its infancy) mostly understood it was a wildly new and bizarre technology. I’m not saying we were smarter, I’m saying we were a little shy of it.
But the people in college now probably grew up with FB in high school. So they’ve seen it for so many years now, they’re much more permissive. And the explosion has taken away much of the timidity of using it. So it’s not just kids, either: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/276188,future-head-of-british-mi6-in-scandal-over-facebook-appearance.html
A quick visit to fark.com will reveal, about daily, some police officer, school teacher, or employee who screwed up by posting inappropriate pics or made comments that were stupid.
I’ve recently heard of two gymnasts getting in trouble for FB. One, after a bad practice, went home and updated her status to say “F*** (name of coach)” and the other posted comments about what she would like to do, sexually explicitly, to her male coach. The second girl was kicked out of the gym, the first girl had to apologize to her team. Both comments were visible to every girl on their team, and every girl they were friends with in that state’s gymnastics world.
Policing FB is impossible in terms of “banning” students. They’ll just open anonymous accounts, or have a “public” one the school knows about, and a secret identity one.
I renew even more vigorously my comments last time. Parents, coaches, and responsible adults alike, NEED to be on FB, and not just passively, but super actively. Moms, dads, responsible non-sketchy coaches, get on FB and ACTIVELY leave posts on your child’s wall, so she knows you’re there, and knows you’re watching. Comment on your daughter’s statuses, make sure your presence is known. Tag her in notes and albums. Don’t just befriend her and then never log in. MONITOR it by participating. Once it becomes ingrained in their brains that adults are on it and active and watching, it will magically become “uncool.” Just being on FB and not participating is like letting all the boys and girls go into your basement, giving them booze to boot, and never checking in on them. And if you’re stupid enough to do that, you shouldn’t be a parent. Yes, there will run a risk of inappropriate coaches and dads saying inappropriate things to their girls or girls’ friends; but again, the more people involved and monitoring, the more likely moms will be aware of it. If you see the dad of another gym kid leaving comment after comment on your daughter’s profile, engaged TOO much, you know something might be wrong. If you never check, you’ll never know.
Moms especially: support each other in doing this. Get together, talk about it, come up with a plan. Create accounts, log in, befriend all the girls on team, and then carpet-bomb your kids with messages. It’ll blow their minds. Once all of you are doing it, there won’t be the stigma associated with it that you think there is. You’re protecting your children from themselves, and they need it.
Actively, aggressively participating (wisely yourself, for god’s sake) should calm things down, for a while, until they find the next thing that will scare the bejesus out of us.
Which will be a ghost account.
The only people that can view your profile if you leave it on public are those from your school. It’s not like the whole world can see what you are doing. Setting it to private only cuts out those from your school or work or network…kinda pointless.
I too, was in college when FB first hit. It was absolutely genious to require a college email. I agree that opening it to non-college users was silly and that younger users especially are most vulnerable. It is so lax today, and can easily come back to haunt you. Now, I’m an employment recruiter and frequently use FB to “learn” about job applicants (similar to researching current college athletes or athletic recruits). In my experience, between 50-75% of FB users do not have their profiles set to “friends only”. Scary, but true. I’ve warned friends to set to private, and they just say “eh, if an employer doesn’t like me for my FB profile then I don’t want to work at that company anyways”. YIKES.
Most people on FB belong to more than one network. For example, their college/high school/alma mater and the city they reside in. It is very easy to join one of these city networks and view profiles. I don’t reside in Phoenix, AZ, but could join that network if I wanted to check profiles of job applicants there. There are many many MANY ways to get around privacy settings if you have a few hours to spare and tool around the Internet techie sites. Private lives are no longer such if one does not extremely cautious.
Teams requiring profiles set to private is essential…and hiring the college’s IT majors to run the hacking tricks too.
A more common problem for me seems to be due to being both a coach and athlete of the same team of athletes. So my lax-general policy is such: no ‘friending’ any of my athletes, period; and no ‘friending’ any teammate who is under 18 (haven’t had this problem yet); and the most important one is, even if they’re in the photos from nationals/camp/training/competition/travel pics, etc, no posting photos of kids under 15. Especially without parental consent or their knowledge!
You can’t deny teens or adults from using facebook, but you can be mighty careful about what you allow to be presented and said online.
Why does this guy think it’s “impossible” to not be on Facebook if you’re under 25? Does he know what impossible means?
EVERY user, needs to use common sense. Athletes, coaches and otherwise. Dropping F bombs, posting stupid photos, and making inappropriate comments are simply bad manners at the very least. Parents, check up on your kids. Kids, don’t be fools – remember that what you post WILL be remembered and come back to haunt you. Adults in general – use your heads. Common sense please.
We have a boy at our gym who has cystic fibrosis and he was unaware of his shortened life expectancy. That is, until he read the wall of a couple coaches who were discussing it on facebook. His parents carefully monitored his internet usage to avoid such a thing, but never thought facebook would be an issue.
I am sick of people telling everyone what to do. These girls and guys are COLLEGE AGE they are not stupid.
Coachs, That is disgusting to lie to your child. They have a right to know everything.
If you give your child internet access they can look anything up.
Coach S.
Email jaovideos@gmail.com if you’d like to discuss CF, life expectancy, and growing up with it. Feel free to give that email address to his parents, too, if they have questions about his future and what it means to be an adult with CF.
To add another dimension to this, and get people to think twice about what they write and how they use the internet and social networking sites, check this out.
I also heard that a new type of crime is being created through Twitter, where criminals are monitoring for families who announce that they are going on vacation in order to rob their homes while they are away.
There IS a way to make your facebook unsearchable, so…
that’s not true. You can have a universally public account.
There is no way they could enforce an outright ban, since you can make your facebook unsearchable. Also, nothing would stop people from creating fake accounts, and it would be extremely difficult to conclusively prove that a facebook account belongs to a particular person, which they better do if they’re talking about yanking scholarships (or even dropping walk-ons).
As a general rule of thumb, it would behoove people in general to use discretion–don’t post anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with your parents, or coaches, seeing, even if you think they can’t see your account; that alone eliminates a lot of problems.
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