The most famous conference in college football, the Southeastern Conference (better known as the SEC), has decided to ban all forms of social media from their college stadiums. Their reasoning is that they signed an exclusive deal with CBS, meaning that CBS owns the majority of their media rights. Facebook and Twitter generate large amount media that falls outside of CBS’s contract, hence the reason for the ban. If you are going to a SEC game, forget about tweeting or uploading images of the game to Flickr. There are many big time college football programs in this conference including defending champion Florida, LSU, Auburn, Alabama and Georgia.
Forget that fact that this almost an unenforceable rule, how are they going to stop random fans from twittering from their phones? This ban is probably geared more towards the press boxes. It is still curious that the SEC has decided to swim upstream on this one. Banning social media is almost an impossible and counter productive task. Twitter has been a big boon for sporting events, people tweeting about certain games has generated interest and can drive more people to flip on the game. We decided to design a shirt for the occasion. Introducing the new SEC: Social Media Exempt Conference. Get the shirt here.