Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/703041
Patrick Mansell SEASON OF HOPE Summer is a time for optimism, but the real test awaits in the fall n a world of online scams and social media hackers, I shouldn't have fall- en for it. But I did. We had just submitted our interview requests to Penn State for this football preview magazine, including one with senior linebacker Brandon Bell, so the timing didn't seem far off when my phone buzzed. It was a notification from Twitter that read "Brandon Bell #11 fol- lowed you." Look at that, I thought, I made it. More appropriately, I figured he had some- thing to tell me before I wrote the up- coming article or maybe he was recalling our previous interactions from earlier in his career or when he was a high school recruit from Mays Landing, N.J. But, no. Hours after the alert popped up, it was suspended, just like that, and I was left wondering. What I hadn't realized at the time was that Bell had deleted his Twitter ac- count long before. This notification came from an imposter, just another in- ternet hack. Penn State's athletic de- partment found out about it, and the fraudulent account was nixed before any damage was done. "That Twitter was not me," Bell laughed a couple weeks later. "I haven't had Twitter for a while. I deleted it last summer. People were hitting me up, [asking], You finally made a Twitter handle? And I'm like, What? I didn't do anything. Someone, I guess, was imper- sonating me, so I had to let the Penn State people know. I think they got it taken care of." Ah, 2016. Not only does the minimally paid college athlete have to battle the use of his likeness for corporate profit, now he has to worry about internet trolls who can jeopardize his online presence, too. It can be laughed off when, as in Bell's case, it's caught be- fore any public damage has been done. JUDGMENT CALL I