Student-Athlete Facebook Privacy

At the end of the day, if you CHOOSE to be a Division I athlete and CHOOSE to accept the "money" (tuition, equipment, training, etc.) then you CHOOSE to follow the rules they set. Competing in college is not a RIGHT but a PRIVILEGE. If you don't want to play by the rules, pick a different institution or don't do gymnastics.
Is it "fair"? No. Is is "ethical"? Who knows.
At the end of the day, you as an individual have the choice about what you agree to and not agree to. College athletic scholarships are essential "at will" employment...unless you make sure you have a good clause in your contract. This is all just a bunch of entitled teenagers who feel like they should be allowed to do whatever they want.

Social media empowers everyone, right? We see something just remotely, possibly, interessting or fun and with a press on the key we sent it further - and it's nothing to us. It's out there, it's available, we see a button that urge us to "action" and we do. It's a constant "flow" of everything which is clicked on and counted up and flashed as "interessting" etc. because we added to those counter numbers by our choice of "action" (if we did choose or if we just did because we could).

I cant say about "needanswers" example, but what we do or how we act on social media DO matter. We are not unimportant as individuals, so we need to think more about what we do and how it affects others. When one retweets something, even if one didn't write it oneself, one implies that one stand behind what is said, there's something there that is interesting to us. It's fun, it's interessting, it's mean towards or "tell"/gossip/lie something about someone we personally dont like, but cant say, so - we retweet it. "I'm not the one saying this! I dont know anything about this, but..." : tweet, tweet! "Hot topic".
Even if the text itself is neutral, there's a possibility the username behind it has a "reputation" on the web as being aggressive to someone/something or endorsing something not good, so by retweeting it one promote and lend ones own name and what one represent (team, school, for instance) to that username. When one retweet something one do commercial for the retweeted thing or username, it's as simple as that. Pressing the "keys" is simple, but do we really want to fling open every possible door - just because it is possible?
I'm against social monitoring, but everyone should remember that NOTHING one write or do on social media is absolutely private and one shouldn't do or act in a way that one is not ready to answer for. And one need to think critically about what one write, tweet, retweet, the information of self and others one let out. Less is better. It's not just what one can do to others - to people one dont like OR to those one represent and can potentially "hurt" by not acting responsible - but everything you do also tell something about yourself.
Even if a person retweet a lot of things and dont necessarily stand behind every word in what they retweet, the retweeting itself may say something of that person. What choices does she/he make, how responsible is the person, is it someone we would trust to represent us? To say (tweet, retweet) less is better. A lot of things and conflicts are solved with a little time and patience, but small disagreements tweeted or retweeted to the entire world at seconds notice can do a lot of harm. Those reading will judge the tweeter/retweeter too. Would I tell or trust this person with anything?
I think there are really upsetting things with the monitoring service mentioned above, with the kinds of monitoring they offer. For instance: monitoring third person comments... Makes me think of East Germany...
I think some kind of organized information event by schools where they stress the problems with privacy and social media in general and the responsibilities of representing would be to prefere. How ones behavior dont only affect others but also ones own "image" as an athlete and future jobseeker. Good employers dont monitor their empolyees as much as they expect their employees to be able to do good choices by themselves. They dont hire people who dont seem to have those "self-monitoring" (this I do and this I dont) qualifications in themselves.
This was long, please remove if it takes up to much space! Interesting and important topic!

My teammate got in trouble for retweeting a completely clean comment, the problem was the coaches didn't like the person they retweeted Twitter name...this monitoring is getting out of control D1 athletes have absolutely no privacy. I don't think u should be able to get in trouble for retweeting anything .none of the information is being written by you so how can u get in trouble for it.

Did you read their whole comment??? It was an example. Re-read the whole thing carefully.

Unfortunately nowadays being a student-athlete is seen more as a career than as an extracurricular activity, more so at the DI level. You're expected to be professional because you are representing your team, your sport, and your college. I'm not saying I agree with monitoring social media, but I can understand why they are doing so. An ample amount of employers use social media as a way of monitoring their employees. We had Disney come to our college to promote internship opportunities and one of their criteria was that they had access to your Facebook and Twitter account because they wanted to make sure you were being upheld to the "Disney Standard". I believe that is why these colleges are choosing to use this. When an athlete makes the decision to represent their school, regardless if they're on scholarship or not, they are choosing to be held by a standard. For many athletes, predominately in DI schools and in some sports more than others, their sport becomes more of a priority than their schooling thus making their student-athlete status more of a job. That is why they can be held at such standards.

I agree with Voice of Reason.

It's not all about trust, it's about IMAGE. The media runs this country (basically the world) and if someone posts something, they can do whatever they want it it.
I don't agree that everyone should have to, I believe it should be up to the school/sports discretion.

CK, anything you post on facebook or twitter is NOT private. Student-athletes are representatives not only of themselves, but of the University and the program. Just as a coach has a right to impose a curfew or a dress code, they have a right to monitor their athletes activity on social media sites. If you want your life to be privite, then don't have a facebook or twitter account.

When someone joins a team, they have to abide by certain rules, and if one of those is to have your social media accounts monitored, so be it. If you don't like it, you can go to another school that doesn't monitor (good luck finding one!). Some teams even ban athletes from being on social media at all. It's simply a team rule.
I don't get why you all making the schools out to be the bad guys here. Every night on SportsCenter, they feature tweets from athletes. Journalists use tweets and facebook posts in news stories, even police have used posts to help find suspects and info. While most student-athletes are an issue, I've seen people post photos themselves drinking when they're 18, posts complaining about their coaches or teammates, posts about how they're skipping class, posts that are derogatory toward women or certain races - all things that could cause problems to the school, the team and the individual posting them.

just curious for some input from whoever reads this...

i'm on a D1 gymnastics team and at the beginning of the school year, we are required to sign a contract stating we will friend our coach on fb and follow them on twitter, if we use those forms of social media. we are also required to keep our fb picture amount to 100 total (including profile pictures and any other albums). when we put pictures up, we are not naive. we keep them clean and professional as it is. but our coach feels it is too time-consuming to go thru so many fb profiles looking at 20+ albums on each... just wondering what ppl thought about this because while none of us agree with it and it stings every new school year that we have to sign the contracts, it's what we gotta do to do what we love and we don't really have a say anyway. we understand why they do it, we just feel like it's an invasion of privacy. like keeping our fb pics to 100 doesnt make our team better. soo yeah, opinions would be greatly appreciated.

pretty sure this is actually breaking some law, or depriving them of some legal rights (which is also breaking the law). Absolutely disgusting.

This is ridiculous...

While we were not required to register with any site, our coach and assistant coach would check what we were putting on our pages. Namely, inappropriate sexual pictures, underage drinking and anything they deemed inappropriate. Part of this may be that we signed a moral code of ethics (we're a private school) prior to start of season- also we had the choice to "friend" them or not. Regardless- the point was that we're representing our team and our institution; we're held to a higher standard and we have the choice to accept this as athletes (and be on the team) or not (and be off the team).

What if they do not friend the site? Do they make it mandatory to be on facebook? Something smells.....