Guy Adams, the Twitter user who had his account suspended for bashing NBC’s Olympics coverage relentlessly — just like the rest of the internet — is back in business, apparently. According to Adams, his account was reinstated after NBC withdrew the formal complaint it had filed against him with Twitter execs — a petty, boneheaded thing to do (in other words a very NBC thing to do) that has only led to people hating and mocking them even more, as evidenced by the prolific source of LOLs the #NBCfail hashtag has become.
Still, Twitter has yet to explain why they actually shut Adams’ account down after NBC filed their bitchy little complaint. He writes:
Even now that my account has been re-activated, all I got was a four-sentence email from Twitter’s ‘Trust and Safety’ department telling me the initial complaint had been retracted.
I had been trying, for 24 hours now, to speak with an employee about their decision to suspend my account. But at that time while the storm of publicity was at its height, they simply wouldn’t return emails or calls.
I’d still like to ask how exactly I was supposed to have broken their “privacy policy.” Not least because that policy states that: “If information was previously posted or displayed elsewhere on the internet prior to being put on Twitter, it is not a violation.”
The email address of Mr Gary Zenkel, the NBC executive at the heart of this bizarre affair, was posted on a blog established in 2011, by a campaigning organisation urging supporters to “boycott NBC.” I found it there, prior to sending out Friday’s supposedly-offending Tweet, in roughly 30 seconds via a website Twitter ought to have heard of. It’s called Google.
This whole thing is exceedingly sad to me because Twitter has done so much to build itself up as an organic tool for good change in the world, and it seems to have blown it all the good will it’d stockpiled over the years to sh*t with a single misguided favor to a widely loathed soulless corporation. They’ll now likely be viewed as being in cahoots with “The Man.” And you know what? They probably deserve to be.
(Pic via)