News media this week reported next year’s London Olympics will allow athletes to tweet from the Summer Games.
In fact, that consent was contained in general guidelines applying to all social media, which were issued to athletes back in May and which themselves are a variant of guidelines issued for Vancouver 2010 and, later, the Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne…
They are permissive yet notably try to protect broadcasters and sponsors. Video and audio from within venues is banned and other material must be “in a first-person, diary type format and should not be in the role of a journalist”. Athletes are forbidden from promoting their sponsors in social media.
In parts, the guidelines are loose enough to potentially be contradictory. Athletes are allowed to “post still photographs” from inside venues but not to “distribute these photographs”.
“Taking Facebook as an example, we would be crazy not to want to be involved in a platform that has half a billion active users – that’s one in 12 people in the world,” according to IOC communications director Mark Adams.
Here are the guidelines in full from the IOC’s website…
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