Tweeting Up Controversy in 'Socialympics'

PARIS — In the run-up to the Summer Olympics in London, the International Olympic Committee hailed the dawn of the first “conversational” Games, saying social media would make possible new ways of “sharing and connecting.”

Only a few days into the Games, the conversation is getting messy — especially on Twitter, the microblogging platform.

On Tuesday, the British police said they had detained a teenager “on suspicion of malicious communications” in connection with a Twitter post about Tom Daley, a diver on the British Olympic team.

On Monday, a Swiss soccer player, Michel Morganella, was kicked out of the Games by his country’s Olympic Committee after he posted what was described as a racially offensive message on Twitter about Koreans.

The expulsion of Mr. Morganella followed a separate Twitter incident in which a Greek triple jumper, Voula Papachristou, was bounced from the Games after posting allegedly racist comments about Africans and linking to videos of Golden Dawn, an extremist far-right political party in Greece.

Meanwhile, a British newspaper reporter, Guy Adams, on Tuesday was fighting to get his Twitter account reinstated. Mr. Adams was banished after he mounted a Twitter campaign against the decision of the NBC television network, which is broadcasting the Games in the United States, to show events like the opening ceremonies on tape delay, rather than live.

In one of his postings, Mr. Adams urged readers to complain to Gary Zenkel, the NBC executive overseeing the Olympics coverage. Mr. Adams included Mr. Zenkel’s NBC e-mail address, adding: “Tell him what u think!”

Twitter’s guidelines prohibit people from posting private e-mail addresses, but addresses that have previously appeared elsewhere are exempted. Mr. Adams maintains that he was wrongly cut off by Twitter because a simple Google search turned up Mr. Zenkel’s address, meaning that it could not have been considered private.

On the Web site of The Independent, the newspaper for which Mr. Adams writes, he noted that Twitter had a partnership with NBC for the Olympics.

NBC said in a statement that it had complained to Twitter about the posting of Mr. Zenkel’s e-mail address. “According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy,” the network said. “Twitter alone levies discipline.”

A Twitter spokeswoman said the company did not comment on individual users for privacy reasons.

In the case involving the comments about Mr. Daley, the authorities said they were questioning a 17-year-old boy in Weymouth, England, under a 1988 law that outlaws “the offense of sending letters etc. with intent to cause distress or anxiety.”

The move came after the teenager wrote on Twitter, “you let your dad down i hope you know that,” following Mr. Daley’s failure to win a medal in one of the diving events. Mr. Daley’s father, Robert, died last year of brain cancer.

“I worry that this will become the norm,” wrote Padraig Reidy, news editor of Index on Censorship, a free-speech group, in a blog entry. “Man says nasty thing on the Internet, nice people get upset by nasty thing, nice people demand something be done about nasty thing, police pursue easy conviction (all the evidence is online after all, and there are a million willing witnesses), nasty man gets convicted and everybody slaps each other on the back for having done their bit. The thrill of active netizenship.”

The police action was surprising because it came only days after an appeals court overturned the conviction of a Briton in a similar case involving Twitter, in which the man had jokingly threatened to blow up an airport after his flight had been delayed by a snowstorm. A lower court had convicted him of sending a menacing message, but the appeals court rejected that.

Before the Olympics, most of the attention on social media related to the Games had focused on marketing issues, after Britain passed a special law to protect Olympic sponsors from so-called ambush marketing.

Several American track and field athletes who are sponsored by Nike, which is not a sponsor, have taken to Twitter to criticize the restrictions.

Christine Haughney contributed reporting.