The Southeastern conference has taken a page from the National Football Network: place extreme restrictions on how the media can cover events. Nothing unusual there! The NCAA has a media policy and they do enforce it.
But where the NFL stops, the SEC went further. In addition to the new media policy, the NCAA has also updated what fans can do in the stands during games: ejected for updating Twitter.
The new rules state that fans can not update their Facebook status, no tweeting, no posting photos to Flickr and no uploading videos to YouTube.
“A conference spokesman said this policy was meant to try to keep as many eyeballs as possible on ESPN and CBS — which are paying the SEC $3 billion for the broadcast rights to the conference’s games over the next 15 years — and also on the SEC Digital Network — the conference’s own entity that’s scheduled to debut on SECSports.com later this month,” Michael Kruse from the St. Petersburg (Fla) Times wrote.
The SEC is considering changing the rules after receiving severely negative feedback from the public.
We’ve put in a request for comment from the LSU athletic foundation. We’ll update the story when we get a response.
UPDATE: The SEC, due to mass negative publicity, has somewhat changed their stance.