Howdy, and welcome to your weekly FOIAball. It’s Wednesday again! We promise to get back to our usual schedule soon, but there was no chance we’d be sending a blast email on Christmas Day.
With that in mind, we’ll be off next week, because no one reads anything during that seven-day, half-drunk fugue state. Me included. But if you missed our programming note at the end of last week’s big balloon story, starting in 2026, FOIAball will be coming to your inbox twice a week!
Our Thursday newsletter will continue as our anchor blog, but the fun snippets and tidbits we’ve been sharing—along with our culinary exploits—will move to its own home, called FOIAbites. That will be just for paid subscribers.
So if you are a free subscriber and want the full FOIAball experience… the time to upgrade is now.
In this week’s edition, how schools monitor your tweets, and Jordon Hudson’s first successful FOIA.
Kudos to her!
How your tweets are tracked
On Monday, Oct. 27, an engagement farming Michigan State account posed a question to its 28,000 followers.
“If you were J. Batt, what would you do with Jonathan Smith? Fire him now, fire him at the end of the season, or give him another year?”
The image macro went up after the Spartans lost their fifth game in a row, squandering both a 3-0 start and any goodwill among the fan base.
The post got 1,500 likes and 175 comments. Most called for the school’s athletic director, J Batt, to fire Smith, the team’s head football coach.
“Fire him and hire Kelly or Franklin.”
“Fire him not the right fit.”
“Can him yesterday.”
The post didn’t tag anyone. Didn’t have any explosive virality. So it’s fair to assume it was lost in the internet ether.
Unless you are Michigan State’s athletics department. And you’re tracking those key phrases on Instagram.
You can probably guess if they were.
Just two short decades ago, the only way to vent frustration over a botched fourth-down play or a middling coach’s defensive scheme or another loss in another lost season was in person. At the office, maybe. Or over a few beers. You know, private, closed-off conversations.
Not anymore. With social media the dominant platform for all our discourse, exasperated, furious, despondent, and annoyed fans all holler online.
You may think those fired-off asides that don’t tag teams or mention players are just blips on the timeline. But you’d be wrong. Schools are watching what fans are saying online, monitoring their base’s sentiment with the aid of third-party vendors, which suck up ungodly amounts of content. Your fuming post is now run through a proprietary algorithm to become a contextual data point for a school to use.
Athletics departments keep tabs on memes, Reddit threads, even Pinterest boards, utilizing the same kind of software the Department of Homeland Security employs to track misinformation online.
They can even use AI to scan the web for logos, your smiling selfie in a hat getting scooped up and analyzed.
As you can imagine, we wanted to find out what these schools were trying to find out online.
Social media monitoring has exploded as a business alongside the rise of online discourse, with metrics-obsessed brands eager to know what people are saying about them on the internet.
Firms like Meltwater, Zoomph, Hootsuite, Critical Mention, and Social Sprout have turned your posts into a billion-dollar industry, crawling the web on behalf of Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and college sports teams.
Contracts obtained by FOIAball show the tremendous reach these companies have, able to hoover up everything from a post on Facebook by a major news site to an aggrieved comment at the bottom of a blog with four readers. (Shhh, we have more than that.)
Meltwater’s 2021 agreement with Marshall University boasted that it maintains “the world's largest database of news sources,” tracking 300,000 different outlets. It also scans “300 million unique social media sites,” despite most of us only knowing of seven. (The other 299,999,993, according to Meltwater, are blogs and microblogs.)
Which is too many blogs and microblogs.
Since then, those numbers have shot up. Now, Meltwater says clients “tap into 1.2 trillion social and editorial conversations to shape your brand narrative.”
It’s a pretty big data set that a university can acquire for a pretty reasonable sum.
At Marshall, the school pays about $15,000 a year for Meltwater’s services. And if you tweeted about its athletic director, or its football, soccer, basketball, or baseball coach, the school was aware of it.
At Michigan State, the athletics department tracks hashtags like #GoGreen and mentions of its AD and football and basketball coaches.
Its search parameters do ask to exclude posts mentioning “crypto” and “billionaires,” which is understandable.
UConn spent a little more on its monitoring services, paying Zoomph $18,000 this year.
The Huskies’ contract shows the firm monitors the school’s social handles across “Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, IG Stories, YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok,” while providing data for other major conferences to help the school compare its performance.
The document also revealed Zoomph's ability to use AI to search for logos, an entirely new form of surveillance that, well, I don’t think anyone wants firms like this to have.
UConn told FOIAball in its response that it did not track individual search terms online. Instead, it monitors its athletes’ mentions and discourse surrounding them.
What does that look like in practice? Well, here is the University of Kentucky’s dashboard, which has “active listening” for specific members of its basketball team and its (now former) head football coach.
So yes, your “Fire Mark Stoops” rant on TikTok may have made a difference.
As for what metrics schools got from these companies, well, we didn’t ask for that, assuming it would have been deemed proprietary data.
Naturally, we still got some.
From New Mexico State University, we obtained an engagement report from Social Sprout that shows how its interactions, DMs, likes, and mentions trended for the week of Sept. 28.
It was a good seven days for them. Not only did they beat Sam Houston State, but impressions, engagement, link clicks, and audience were all up.
They did lose some followers on X, though.
For this story, FOIAball sent requests out to around 50 schools. We were frankly surprised at how many of them said they did not engage social media monitoring firms.
Until we realized major conferences are doing the work for them.
FOIAball obtained an email from the SEC that reveals it hosts an interactive dashboard for schools to track online sentiment.
In August, it sent the following report to Kentucky, which shows how your content morphs into metrics.
“Here is digital listening data for Kentucky Athletics from August 2025. This data was captured using a digital listening tool that scrapes the web for publicly available mentions of your university’s athletic department.”
The SEC, specifically, noted it tracked “X, media, Facebook, Reddit, Forums, Instagram, blogs, comments, and Pinterest.” Yes, they want to know what those rabid Dawgs are fuming about amid house renovation mood boards.
The SEC found 67,800 posts online about the Wildcats, the discourse ramping up by 46% as football season started.
“Fall camp conversation rolled straight into a Week One win over Toledo, driven by real-time play-by-play, early takeaways on the RB room, and optimism about the season’s ceiling. [Kentucky Sports Radio] reporters dominated the month’s spikes; an in-game thread earned 621 engagements, while postgame updates centered on injuries and rotations.”
They also flagged the month’s top post, which was a recirculated meme.
But these firms don’t just track mentions; they use brute force processing to analyze whether people are saying good or bad things about a particular school.
Texas Tech provided us a handy list of 2,600 words that these firms use to deem discourse positive or negative.
We aren’t sure why there are so many British-isms involved, and we don’t want to know.
For Kentucky, discourse in August “skewed neutral overall,” which is probably the best anyone can hope for on the internet.
There was “a positive tilt driven by the football opener and continued optimism around Mark Pope’s basketball program. Negative pockets clustered around injury updates and a bit of preseason skepticism on football projections.”
At least one school, though, kept it remarkably old-school.
While Clemson said it tracked mentions of its football coach, both coordinators, and its quarterback, the school only monitored broadcast television.
No small screen drama for the Tigers, which we respect.
Jordon Hudson doesn’t find out
I used to run a FOIA internship for college students, where aspiring journalists joined my newsroom for a semester to learn how to conduct investigative reporting through public records requests.
At the beginning of every internship, they all had the same big fear. What if they didn’t get any records back?
Some of the students had submitted previous requests and gotten denials. Others had never filed anything, afraid of fighting a losing battle for documents.
It was an understandable concern. My first-ever request was rejected. But, I assured them, done properly, with the correct research, precise language, and some insight from me along the way, they would absolutely get hits.
So we have to give Jordon Hudson props, as she succeeded on what we assume is her first FOIA, filed without my helping hand.
Earlier this month, FOIAball broke the news that Bill Belichick’s girlfriend had gone gumshoe, sending four records requests to UNC for emails about the media circus around her.
This week, she got back over 300 pages of emails from UNC’s top athletics communications official.
But Hudson learned this week, like most of my students, that a lot of responsive records are duds. You may think you have a juicy topic, but when you get a big ol’ batch of pages, what you find is just civil servants doing their jobs well.
That’s what we saw in the pages, which showed UNC’s comms team fielding numerous requests after Bill Belichick got hired, most of which they turned down.
As for Hudson, she didn’t appear to come up at all.
Housekeeping, again
If you missed last week’s update… or the update at the top of this newsletter, well, the third time is the charm.
Here’s where we’d normally share a recipe from our kitchen, but going forward, that will be woven into a new column called FOIAbites.
Know that we’re hard at work launching the new edition, and it will definitely be coming the first week of 2026.
So while there won’t be a FOIAball next week (or maybe there will, I’m always apt to change my mind), you’ll get double the fun going forward. But you need to be a paid subscriber to get the full experience.
If you’ve enjoyed reading FOIAball these first four months (seriously, we are literally only like 130 days old), please upgrade today. Consider it a Christmas gift to me.