Twitter suspends reporter’s account after NBC tweet

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The microblogging service suspended Guy Adams, the Los Angeles correspondent for London-based daily The Independent, after he sent a tweet on Friday revealing NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel’s email address.

The solution is simple — just don’t suck so bad, NBC.



  • http://twitter.com/Pat_Mahon Patrick 

    OK first off, he should not have tweeted the email address. I don’t care about the details of that story

    But… since when does twitter get to edit or sensor tweets? That’s a bigger story IMO

    • Steven Fisher

      It’s pretty easy to ignore emails. I’ve been doing it all day.

      • http://twitter.com/Pat_Mahon Patrick 

        Well there’s that of course Steven. But that wasn’t the point I was making. Which, by the way, Adrian has marked my card on (in his ‘black & white world’ way).

        • Steven Fisher

          Not really disagreeing. I don’t have a serious problem with the tweet, but I wouldn’t do it myself and I’d be equally pissed if the same thing were to happen to me.

          I just think it’s a silly thing to suspend an account over.

  • adrianoconnor

    Um, since they owned the service and since you agreed to the ToS, I imagine.

    • http://twitter.com/Pat_Mahon Patrick 

      Well, “Um”, okay yeah… That was actually rhetorical. More a question of should they? Obviously it’s evident that they ‘can’.

      Sorry I’ve had to spell that out.

      • adrianoconnor

        Sorry, my response was also a bit rhetorical really. I got what you were trying to say. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but this is the nature of closed systems owned by somebody else. They can, if they want, and that’s that.

        • http://twitter.com/Pat_Mahon Patrick 

          A slightly more amicable response. Thank you Adrian

  • http://twitter.com/RASTERMAN RASTERMAN

    He should have just tweeted a link to a site containing the email address. That should have neatly avoided any Twitter TOS issues.

    —RASTER

  • http://www.acid-product.co.uk Ian Davies

    Take a look at Guy Adams’s own response to this before jumping to conclusions: http://is.gd/EYQiih

    Basically the ToS forbids the publishing of private email addresses (Zenkel’s email address is corporate) but even then if the email address has been previously published elsewhere on the internet (it had) then the ToS themselves state that publishing it again on Twitter is not a violation.

    Add to that the claim by NBC that the complaint was actually initiated by Twitter, and you have something that stinks pretty bad.