Social Media Banned at College Stadiums

Say you’re at a college football game. Say you take a cool pic on your iPhone of the field and upload it to Facebook. Say you tweet your excitement/heartbreak as the game progresses. Then say you get smacked down by the Southeastern Conference (SEC) for doing so.

That’s entirely possible, because the SEC has banned social media from its college stadiums. Fans at the games are prohibited from sending out "any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the event.”

Far from not understanding the power of social media, the SEC perhaps understands it far too well. The idea behind the ban is to protect the interests of the broadcasters, ESPN and CBS, which will pay the SEC $3 billion for the rights to show games for the next 15 years. User-generated clips and real-time information, often accessible by mobile device, undermine the need to carve out time to sit down in front of the television.

It’s unclear how, exactly, the SEC will enforce the ban. Facebook and Twitter for instance allow privacy controls banning anyone from seeing a person’s posts without their express consent.