Here is what happened in a nutshell: On July 29th Twitter suspended Guy Adams’ account because NBC complained about the following tweet that Guy sent out.

 

 

 

NBC filed an official complaint with Twitter because Guy tweeted NBC Executive Gary Zenkel’s corporate email address.

Here is Twitter’s Privacy Terms:

Privacy: You may not publish or post other people’s private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, street address or Social Security/National Identity numbers, without their express authorization and permission.

The problem is Guy didn’t tweet Gary Zenkel’s private email. He tweeted his corporate email address, which Guy claims can be found by anyone who types it into Google, therefore making it a public.

Not until today was his account returned to him. Twitter apologized for suspending the account in the first place.

Twitter’s response:

…we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up. The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly. Our Trust and Safety team did not know that part of the story and acted on the report as they would any other.

As I stated earlier, we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are. This behavior is not acceptable and undermines the trust our users have in us. We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is — whether a business partner, celebrity or friend. As of earlier today, the account has been unsuspended, and we will actively work to ensure this does not happen again.

Kudos to Twitter for coming out and saying they made a mistake. The problem is it appears to be more than just an “oops, we didn’t do our research properly” type of mistake.

Here’s why:

Twitter and NBC have a very close Olympic partnership right now and Guy Adams believes that Twitter gave special treatment to NBC because of this.

Twitter is suppose to be…

• the social network that empowers us.
• a platform that lets us speak our mind without censorship.
• a place that unites the world 140 characters at a time.

Twitter is rumored to be in talks to file as a public company in the near future. A public company where the bottom line means everything to it’s shareholders. Let’s hope this “mistake” isn’t setting a precedent where Twitter protects it’s sponsors before it protects it’s users.

Twitter please don’t jump the shark. We will leave.