Please Re-Tweet: NBA Unveils ‘Social Media’ Guidelines

Mark Cuban spoke to a Dallas radio station recently, and among a litany of topics, discussed Twitter, and the way he handles it among his players. From Sports Radio Interviews:

His final point is one that’s lost on far too many players (and Twitter users, in general). What feels like a safe, innocuous medium is in fact a matter of public record. Say something stupid, inappropriate, or critical, and it’s likely that more than just your close friends are going to see it. It’s an aspect of social media that’s intuitive to some, but for many more, is learned only through the pain of public embarrassment or professional setbacks.

From Jerry Zgoda of the Minnesota Star-Tribune comes the story of Kevin Love, who was once one of the more prominent NBA twitter users, but has been silent for the past few months after a few tweets landed him in hot water with T’Wolves management. From Zgoda:

Love, a child of the computer age, embraced the Twitter social-network phenomenon as enthusiastically as any pro athlete, so much so he unintentionally broke the worldwide news that Kevin McHale wasn’t coming back as Timberwolves coach and honestly offered up his comments on the team’s confounding draft night.

“I got shut down a little while from the Boss Man,” Love said. “But be on the lookout: I’ll be back. I just got tired of (Jim) Stack or (Fred) Hoiberg calling me and telling me not to tweet about this, not to tweet about that. I just said, ‘What happened to the First Amendment law?’ ”

David Kahn, the Wolves president of basketball operations, said he wants Love to feel free to tweet and will encourage him to do so.And Love’s situation is indicative of what’s going to be much harder for the NBA to regulate, at least on an institutional level. How do you tell someone what they can and can’t tweet? You can place restrictions on when and where players use social media, but what about “how” they use it?

Kevin Love made waves not because he was talking to fans at halftime, but because he was talking to fans honestly. Like when he responded on draft night to the Wolves taking three points guards: