The U (of You)

“Higher education has by and large embraced influencer culture, which already dominates beauty, travel, health and so much of everyday society. Plenty of schools, like Miami, funnel marketing dollars toward student creators as a recruiting tool or have embraced the RushTok phenomenon of viral sorority selections. But influencing can also be messy, mean and unpredictable, as the college of the Hurricanes discovered last month, when a tearful spat between two freshman influencers spilled offline, generating weeks of tabloid headlines for the university and spiraling into the office of the dean of students.” WaPo (Gift Article): Influencers are royalty at this college, and the turf war is vicious. “Miami no longer had two influencers earning social cred for the school; it had a digital slap fight that hundreds of thousands of people were watching. The student newspaper couldn’t keep the print copies on the news stands fast enough … The New York Post ran a story titled, ‘Campus influencers are in tears over having fewer followers than their peers — and the grift is ruining their college experience.'”

+ NPR: As social media grows more toxic, college athletes ask themselves: Is it worth it? “College basketball players are more at risk than athletes in other sports, the NCAA has found, especially around March Madness, when thousands of abusive or threatening messages flood athletes, many of them from gamblers — some of it so severe and alarmingly specific that the NCAA must alert law enforcement.”