Roxane Coche and Nathan Carpenter Review Effectiveness of New Paris 2024 Olympic Social and Digital Media Guidelines
University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC) Media Production, Management, and Technology Associate Professor and Department Chair Roxane Coche and Nathan Carpenter, UFCJC Atlas Lab director, reviewed the effectiveness of the new social and digital media guidelines established by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Their findings were featured in “IOC’s Positive Social Media Shift: Paris 2024 Online Reactions” published in the University of Texas at Austin Center for Sports Communication & Media Olympic and Paralympic Analysis 2024 on olympicanalysis.org.
The IOC’s decision to relinquish some control over social and digital media for the Paris 2024 Olympics provided positive results by balancing commercial interests with the desire for authentic athlete engagement.
According to Coche and Carpenter, social media had been a major tool for real-time interaction and engagement for almost two decades, but the IOC has had strict rules about social media use from Olympic actors (athletes, broadcasters, volunteers, etc.) to safeguard the Olympic movement’s intellectual property.
In the Atlas Lab, a digital media analysis lab housed at UFCJC, Carpenter tracked more than 140 keywords and terms related to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. This search found more than 93.7 million posts across 48 languages created between the opening ceremony on July 26 and August 12, the day after the closing ceremony. The posts had the collective capacity to generate 8.2 trillion potential impressions.
Those millions of reactions and impressions generated 5% more positive posts than negative posts, and only two moments accounted for the great majority of negative sentiment.
According to the authors, “There is no doubt that this overall positive Olympic sentiment is also in part thanks to athletes’ own posts and thus the revised IOC guidelines. Hence, the IOC has struck a better balance between athlete autonomy and commercial protection. Its next frontier is artificial intelligence, as the current guidelines ban AI-generated content in an effort to maintain the authenticity of the content shared during the Games.”
Posted: August 27, 2024
Category: Atlas Lab, College News, Sports
Tagged as: 2024 Paris Olympics, Atlas Lab, IOC, MPMT, Nathan Carpenter, Roxane Coche, Social Media
