re: never too young

This goes back to the importance of personal branding.  Companies are beginning to recognize that the line between individually branding their employees and branding their entire company has slowly started to fade.  Many though leaders, such a Personal Branding blogger Dan Schawbel, offer insight into how a company's branding and an individual's branding affect the marketplace.

Company: The company influences an audience who speaks to the marketplace and in turn purchases from the company.

Individual: The individual influences an audience, who speaks to the marketplace. The marketplace goes back to the individual and asks for a product or company endorsement.

There are many more pros to personal branding, but from the organizational level, they want to build corporate spokespeople that understand the corporate messaging, so they can attract others to the company.

Since individual's now carry with them greater power to influence the tastes and preferences of buyers or future recruits, companies would be wise to at least take a peak at those they are looking to hire.  Simply view it as risk management.  This is the person that will be promoting your company.  The voice of your organization.  Why hire them if they appear undesirable?

If a Myspace or Facebook user is "smart" enough to post incriminating or illegal photos on their page, I would hope they would be able to discover the privacy settings, ensuring some level of control as to who can view their page.  While I'm not one for editing content on social media platforms simply to appease a certain audience, this just seems like common sense.