(2 of 3)
A rival monitoring company, UDiligence, has Ole Miss and Texas Tech among its 15 clients. Until recently, the UDiligence website featured embarrassing pictures of college athletes in various states of inebriation or provocation. "It's about trying to show mistakes that are out there," says Kevin Long, a former congressional press secretary and a founder of UDiligence. Long denied that the pictures exploited the athletes, but after his interview with TIME, the shots were removed from the UDiligence site.
UDiligence works as an app that a college athlete can install on his Facebook and Twitter pages, giving the company permission to access wall posts and other content that his friends and followers see. (The software does not scan direct messages.) The program flags a standard list of some 600 words--schools can add or subtract terms--in categories such as profanity, violence, alcohol, sex and texting acronyms. UDiligence defines each word and gives it a severity score of 1 (low) to 3 (high). All F-word variants get a 3. Both assclown and a$$clown are flagged and earn a 1, while party scores a 2. (Why is party worse than assclown? Because if a hoops player is tweeting about a party, he's more likely to do something dumb. If he's tweeting about an assclown, that means another kid is being dumb--in the case of a$$clown, perhaps a rich kid.) When these words pop up, the UDiligence program alerts athletes, coaches and administrators.
The idea is that having a monitoring program in place encourages closer self-monitoring: the student learns to flag a regrettable comment before hitting Tweet. Thus the schools are providing an educational service as well as protecting the athlete's job prospects. "When this was first introduced, I thought, Oh, do they want to be in my business?" says Brittany Broome, a senior softball player at Ole Miss and head of its Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. But Broome says she came to appreciate it: "Having that app, that kind of following, is always in the back of your head." She says no Ole Miss athlete has complained to her about UDiligence.
But even as it seeks to minimize exposure for schools and athletes, the e-babysitting of college students creates its own liability risks. What if the monitors miss a threatening tweet, and an athlete harms someone? "The more information you're collecting, the more responsibility you have," says Bradley Shear, an attorney specializing in social media and sports law. Potential lawsuits could cost public universities--and taxpayers--millions. "Doing blanket monitoring is nuts."
Some lawmakers agree. In September, California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that forbids colleges to "require or request" that a student or prospective student "divulge any personal social media information." The law also bans third-party apps like UDiligence from accessing students' private Facebook walls and Twitter accounts. In July, Delaware enacted a similar law. "If you monitor, will students feel free to express themselves?" asks Delaware Representative Darryl Scott, who sponsored the bill. "Facebook is the town square of our age. We're just trying, in some sense, to let kids be kids."