A good friend of mine, Yoda808, sent me a bunch of links about a situation that has taken place between the NCAA, N.C. State, the community, and Facebook.
A freshman at N.C. State started a Facebook group in hopes of attracting a top-ranked high school basketball player from Raleigh. According to the article, “After 700 people joined the group, this person received a cease and desist letter from N.C. State’s compliance director, Michelle Lee, warning of “further action” if he failed to take down the site since the Facebook group’s purpose violated NCAA’s recruiting policies, the Associated Press reported.
Here’s the article: NCAA Clamps Down on Facebook Group for Violating Recruiting Policies.
I’ve talked about this before on this blog about the NCAA restricting the use of social media. I personally think the NCAA needs to update their polices to include the use social media, and to be honest I don’t think they have a clue as to what to do. What if someone in the community, an avid fan of N.C. State who has no current affiliation with the school, created this Facebook page? Would this person still need to take down the page?
The reason why social media has gained so much traction over the years is because it gives the ordinary person a chance to voice his/her opinion and communicate with others. If you take away a person’s right to voice their own opinion doesn’t that violate their 1st Amendment and thus go against everything that social media is?
I’m looking at Facebook right now and I see a “Kentucky needs John Wall” fan page and this is what the description says: “This group is in no way attempting to promote Wall to UK but a group for UK fans to unite who agree that UK needs John Wall. Do not contact John Wall or any recruit in anyway, this is a recruiting violation.”
I see Duke, UNC, Florida State, Kansas, Memphis, etc. just to name a few, so why hasn’t the school and NCAA sent out cease and desist letters? I wish I had a chance to see the fan page.
The only reason why a Facebook fan page should be taken down, in this situation, is if there is personal contact information like a phone number, email address, IM screen names, etc. This makes sense because you need to protect the privacy of the player. Who wants to get 700 emails or phone calls?
Idk…to me as long as no personal information is disclosed, I don’t see why you would need to take a fan page like this down. Again I didn’t see the fan page so I have no clue as to the content that’s on there.
What do you all think?
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