ABSTRACT

Social media, or social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat, have quickly proliferated across sport (Billings, Qiao, Conlin, & Nie, 2015; Sanderson, 2011a; Smith & Sanderson, 2015), and are predicated by design to promote community, collaboration, and sharing (Meraz, 2009). Considering that sport is a popular talking point in many interpersonal settings (see Turman, and Giles & Stohl, this volume) it is not altogether surprising that social media technologies have rapidly been adopted by a variety of sport stakeholders, including team personnel (e.g., coaches, public relations professionals), athletes, sport media personalities, and fans. As these various stakeholders have expanded their social media usage, a variety of implications have been created-both positive and negative for the sport industry-and it is not uncommon to find stories about social media and sport percolating daily sport headlines. For example, in July 2015, Ohio State University quarterback Cardale Jones used Twitter to provide commentary about #BlackLivesMatter, a hashtag created to respond to several noteworthy cases of African-American males killed in police brutality cases in the previous year (Rosenthal, 2015). Similarly, in March 2015, a high school wrestler in Montana was arrested and charged with sexual abuse of children for requesting a 15-year-old girl send him nude pictures over Snapchat (Devlin, 2015).