ESPN, NFL And U.S. Marines Crack Down On Twitter Use

Twitter may have opened up the hour-to-hour lives of sports stars like Shaquille O'Neal and Lance Armstrong for public consumption, but ESPN, the NFL and the U.S. Marines all see the social-networking site as a potential liability. Within the last week, those organizations all enacted measures to control and prohibit their employees' and soldiers' tweets, and consequences now range from watchful censorship to immediate dismissal.

"The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN," the network's NBA analyst Ric Bucher wrote in a post from his personal Twitter account.