Last Wednesday, I was in attendance for the Suns' home game against the Grizzlies. Laptop was open, and so was my Twitter client of choice, when my feed was updated with a tweet from @Amareisreal. This made me LOL, as the kids say, because at that very moment, the account's owner -- Amar'e Stoudemire -- was on the court not 20 feet in front of me, actively participating in his team's 12th win of the season.The league doesn't care who sent the message, though, and their rules governing the use of Twitter or other social media sites like it are pretty basic: don't do it during the games. So while it may be unfortunate (because it obviously wasn't Amar'e doing the tweeting), it's not surprising that Stoudemire was fined $7500 by the league for violating the policy.
Tyson Chandler was also fined for a tweet that was sent out during a game, although his case is a little different, because the message updated to his account came from an automated service, instead of from an actual person.
Chandler's account was updated by a site called twitterfeed, which will automatically send out a tweet for you when a website's RSS feed is updated. Chandler's website happened to be updated, twitterfeed sent out the tweet announcing this fact from Chandler's account during one of his games, and thus the league fined him for it.
Stoudemire's tweet was sent by a person, but it seemed to be purely accidental. According to a source, an intern was the one who sent out the $7500 tweet, and was either unaware of the rule prohibiting it, or oblivious to the fact that his employer was playing in a game at the time the message was sent. Supposedly, the intern won't be around to make this mistake in the future.
It may seem silly for the league to hand down fines in these instances, since only the letter of the law was violated here, and the players weren't exactly tweeting away on their iPhones from the bench. But you can't blame them for not wanting to have to worry about a multitude of loopholes where this ever-evolving technology is concerned, so it's probably best to keep the policy simple, and for the players to be more careful in who (or what) they allow to control these accounts.
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
This is another zero tolerance policy that defies common sense. Should players be tweeting, texting or answering e-mail during the games? No, but why not let each individual team police its own players? Being fined because someone with access to a player's account is using it or an automatic update is just plain ridiculous.