You can't GIF the Olympics, so Twitter is GIFing the Olympics for you
The people are fighting back with GIFs.
The International Olympic Committee's ban on GIFing the opening ceremony on Friday night has led to people getting creative with their Twitter feeds. As the events unfolded live on TV, reaction GIFs flooded Twitter. Occasionally, a sneaky snippet of the ceremony in Rio, Brazil slipped through.
The ban has caused an almost-total media blackout on social media -- a weird thing to happen in 2016. Turns out, Twitter is a strange place to hang out when everyone is talking about a live event but no one knows what it actually looks like.
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The strict rules are apparently to prevent viewers watching footage outside of the official broadcast. In America, NBC paid a whopping $1.2 billion for the rights, so no doubt wants to make sure the internet dwellers abide by its rules.
"The use of Olympic Material transformed into graphic animated formats such as animated GIFs (i.e. GIFV), GFY, WebM, or short video formats such as Vines and others, is expressly prohibited," the Olympic rules state.
So what does the internet do when it can't do what it wants? It acts out. In GIF form. You can take our GIFs but you can't take our creativity.
When people were doing Parkour everywhere.
When they started talking climate change.
When Gisele was walking across the length of the stadium.
When the floor turned into QBert.
When Judi Dench did a voiceover.
When the teams arrived in the stadium.
When a plane flies out of the stadium.
When the psychedelic nightmare happened.
When it continued.
And continued.
And when they danced.
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Jenni Ryall is Mashable's VP of Content Strategy. She spends her time launching cool, new things such as Mashable Deals and Mashable Reels. On the other days, she is developing strong partnerships with companies including Apple News, Flipboard, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
