Jock Police

A tweet can cost a college football team far more than a missed tackle or a dropped catch can. Back in 2010, University of North Carolina defensive tackle Marvin Austin posted about partying in a Miami Beach nightclub: “I live in club LIV so I get the tenant rate … bottles comin like its a giveaway.” (He was quoting rapper Rick Ross.) The post piqued the interest of the National Collegiate Athletic Association; an investigation found that agents showered Austin with cash and boondoggle trips to Miami. Other Tar Heels, it turns out, also broke NCAA rules. In response, the NCAA banned UNC’s football team from this year’s postseason and cut its allotment of football scholarships for the next three years.

Colleges invest millions in their athletic programs and aren’t about to let social-media slipups bring them down. Prompted by cases like North Carolina’s, schools are keeping a closer eye on the Facebook and Twitter feeds of their athletes. Some are monitoring their every digital move, and certain observers–including state governments–are wondering if the oversight goes too far. Universities have long wrestled with legal issues concerning how much control they should exert over their students. The rise of social media in the past decade has made keeping a leash on college jocks all the more contentious. The essential question is, What rights to privacy and free expression should student athletes expect?

The answer for now: not many. Some college teams ban athletes from sites like Twitter altogether. Others take a more nuanced approach, requesting an open door into students’ digital rooms. Utah State University, for example, asks athletes to sign the school’s social-networking policy, which states that the university “supports and encourages the individual’s right of free speech” but prohibits “images that are revealing,” any “display of alcohol or firearms” and “offensive or foul language.” Athletes must “grant full permission for the university and other third-party monitors to gain access to the ‘friends only,’ ‘private,’ and similarly designated areas” of their social-networking pages.

The policy includes the following waiver: “To the extent that any federal, state, or local law prohibits the Athletic Department from accessing my social networking accounts, I hereby waive any and all such rights and protections.” So as a de facto condition for playing sports at Utah State–a public institution of higher learning–you must grant the school license to ignore the law.

“There are all kinds of unconstitutional statutes and governmental actions going on here,” says Phillip Closius, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “It’s clearly suspect.”

And it’s sparking a demi-industry. A few companies snoop for hire: last year, UNC engaged Varsity Monitor to help thwart social-media misuse and now pays $8,640 for software that flags suspicious activity. “We want to make sure athletes represent the institution in a positive manner,” says Amy Herman, an associate athletic director for compliance at UNC. Varsity Monitor’s client list includes the University of Texas football team and Villanova; it recently acquired a competitor, Centrix Social, which counted the University of South Carolina and Auburn among its users.

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.”

Many schools coach their athletes in social-media smarts. The athletic department at Pepperdine University doesn’t monitor but does drill a basic lesson: any tweet can come back to haunt you. Alina Ching, a sophomore golfer at Pepperdine, is glad her school takes such a hands-off approach. “I would feel that my privacy is invaded and that I’m treated like I’m in middle school,” Ching says. “We’re all adults now. I can figure it out.”