Tracking the social media trail of the NEW Nixon tapes…

'Old media', in the form of The Washington Post and journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, brought down one Richard Nixon. And now 'new media', social media, is threatening to do the same to another closer to home.

Ricky Nixon, AFL player manager and owner of sports management company 'Flying Start' is the latest figure in the sports world to be embroiled in a sex scandal. The scandal itself is neither shocking nor surprising – and we'd be ignoring it entirely if it weren't for the fascinating role social media continues to play in the whole affair. AFL sex scandal involving Ricky Nixon .

Central to the scandal is a 17-year-old girl – the same girl who brought a lot of embarrassment and unwanted attention to the St Kilda Football Club by releasing nude photographs of certain players last year. Now she has made allegations (vigorously denied by Nixon) that she and Nixon had a sexual affair that lasted several weeks and used illicit drugs together, supported by a video of the player manager in her hotel room in his underwear.

The girl's use of social media throughout the entire saga has been savvy to say the least. The photos of the St Kilda players first appeared on her Facebook page. She then live-streamed addresses on YouTube (interrupted frequently by phone calls as a result of posting her mobile number on her Twitter account) and has made full use of what seems to be a newly acquired Smartphone in the Ricky Nixon affair, using it to take secret footage and immediately tip off journalists via SMS.

Conspiracy theorists may deny that these are the standard (re)actions of a member of tech-savvy generation that sees itself and the world almost exclusively through the prism of social media, and instead insist other forces are at play.

In evidence, they could point to the discrepancies between the standard of writing in the girl's tweets (very poignant, well-crafted and offering tantalizing pieces of breaking stories) to the somewhat inarticulate and more age-appropriate vernacular she uses in her YouTube videos.

Plus there's the fact that this ongoing AFL-centered cause celebrate has taken some of the gloss off the code's expansion into western Sydney's rugby league heartland – and transferred unwanted attention away from the seemingly more scandal-prone NRL, which happens to be co-owned (at least until 30 April, 2011) by News Ltd, which also happens to be the majority shareholder of both the Melbourne Storm and Brisbane Broncos NRL clubs and also happens to be publisher of the Herald Sun newspaper, which also happens to have paid for this unemployed 17-year-old to stay in the Melbourne hotel and whose journalist she alerted so a photographer could be placed outside the hotel in order to capture images of Nixon leaving at 7.15am…

Such conspiracy notions are, of course, completely fanciful (although you could argue that they are no more fanciful than the idea of a US president bugging his opponent's campaign offices).

But it is completely undeniable that in the social media age, everybody is a potential 'Deep Throat' – and everyone is a Woodward or Bernstein with the ability to break and make a story that can shake institutions to their core.