London Muzzles Its Olympic Volunteers

London may be setting up Europe’s largest Wi-Fi network ahead of the Summer Olympics but it’ll do a fat lot of good for the Games’ 70,000 volunteers as they’re effectively banned from using social media during the event. Like, at all.

The London Olympics Organising Committee (LOCOG), the organisation responsible for mobilising the 70,000 volunteers laid out its new social media rules for its army of unpaid workers. The prohibitions state that workers are to:

• Not disclose their location.
• Not post a picture or video of Locog backstage areas closed to the public.
• Not disclose breaking news about an athlete.
• Not tell their social network about a visiting VIP, e.g. an athlete, celebrity or dignitary.
• Not get involved in detailed discussion about the Games online.

Luckily, these volunteers will be allowed to retweet “official London 2012 postings” as much as they like. So that basically eliminates, FourSquare check-ins, geo-tagged Facebook photos, any sort of tweet and potentially even LinkedIn profile updates.

According to Andy Hunt, chief of the British Olympic Association, “The International Olympic Committee themselves are really pushing the use of social media and we support that.” Just not if you aren’t being paid to be there. [Forbes - BBC News]