Twitter has been lambasted and criticized by people around the world for suspending the Twitter account of a British journalist, Guy Adams. Twitter presumably did so because Adams, while criticizing NBC and its abysmal Olympics coverage, posted the email address of an NBC executive. However, now it has been revealed that this may not be the reason behind the whole incident.
It would be interesting to note here that Twitter and NBC are tied in a rather lucrative partnership on a Twitter site, covering Olympics 2012. Essentially, this means that the two corporations are close.
The tweet with the email id, it has now been discovered, was first flagged by folks at Twitter who then guided NBC people to fill up a form to formally register a complaint. Once this was done, they immediately suspended the account. Thanks to the huge response that this generated, Twitter was forced to reinstate the account and has also issued a formal apology alongside.
According to the post containing this apology, “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.”
Adams, on the other hand, was of the opinion that after having suspended his account, the company wouldn’t even respond to his emails, ‘For a company whose very raison d’etre is communication, Twitter seems remarkably reluctant to talk. I’ve been trying, for 24 hours now, to speak with an employee about their decision to suspend my account. But they won’t return e-mails or calls.”
Nonetheless, Twitter has unsuspended the account with much apologies. But the recurrent question in the minds of Twitter users will be, do they really enjoy freedom of speech online or is it being curbed in light of different partnerships.
Source: Twitter Blog
Courtesy: CNET
[ttjad keyword=”apple-tv”]
