One Olympic-Related Twitter Ban Too Many–Here’s a Heads Up On What You Shouldn’t Do on Twitter

There seems to be quite a stir in the Olympics this year, especially when it came to Twitter. Given the popularity of the micro-blogging site and of social media in general, a couple of guys got banned (and a lot of athletes were either sent home or reprimanded for their posts) because of what they posted on Twitter.

Remember Guy Adams, the British journalist who criticized NBC's poor, poor coverage of the Olympics? His Twitter account was suspended after he posted contact details of the network's head Olympics honcho. The crazy thing was that he posted the  public email address of NBC's Olympics President Gary Zenkel, not his private one--but still, the ban stood. #NBCFail indeed.

Then a couple of Olympics protesters also got their account banned. @London20l2 (the official account is @London2012) was taken down after the organizing committee of the Olympics filed a complaint regarding a breach of trademark, since the account was using the Olympics logo. They posted some humorous albeit ruder than rude content, as you can see in the image above.

So if you want to keep your Twitter account, then listen up. Here's a quick refresher on Twitter's rules so you won't get your account banned:

• Be yourself. Twitter has a no-tolerance policy for impersonation. Why be someone else if you can be yourself?
• R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Don't post other people's private contact information. If they're stupid enough to do that themselves, then let them. Just stay out of it.
• Play nice. Threats aren't taken lightly on Twitter. Unless, of course, they're of the joking kind. But even then, others might not get the joke and think you were being serious, so you're better off not posting them in the first place.
• Stick to one. Don't create serial accounts that link to each other for whatever reason you may have, because all of them might get banned.
• Don't spam. This means don't constantly tweet ads or stuff promoting some other stuff that will annoy the heck out of the other users on your network.
• No porn. At least on your profile picture and background image, anyway.