Reporter’s Twitter account restored after row

Guy Adams, a correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, has had his Twitter account reinstated after a nearly 24-hour suspension for broadcasting the corporate email address of an executive at US broadcaster NBC.

On Friday, Adams had tweeted his outrage over NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in order to catch the primetime audience.

Speaking later on Los Angeles talk radio station KNX 1070, the journalist said he was “utterly outraged” by the coverage, and accused the broadcaster of “treating the people of America with contempt”.

Adams then tweeted the email address of Gary Zenkel, an NBC executive in charge of Olympic coverage, for people to complain to.

On Monday, the microblogging service – a partner in the US network’s online coverage of the games – sent an email to Adams saying his “account has been suspended for posting an individual’s private information such as private email address, physical address, telephone number, or financial documents”.

On Tuesday, in his first tweet since the July 30 suspension, Adams employed the humour the service is often associated with when he said “Oh. My Twitter account appears to have been un-suspended. Did I miss much while I was away?”

The Los Angeles-based journalist quoted an email from Twitter about the reinstating of his account “we have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request…”

Adams then said the email came with “[n]o further explanation … or apology”.

‘Detailed explanation’

Adams said Twitter had bowed to pressure from the broadcaster, saying he had not contravened its rules.

“I’m of course happy to abide by Twitter’s rules, now and forever,” he said in an email to Twitter. “But I don’t see how I broke them in this case: I didn’t publish a private email address. Just a corporate one.”

“[It is] quite worrying that NBC, whose parent company are an Olympic sponsor, are apparently trying [and, in this case, succeeding] in shutting down the Twitter accounts of journalists who are critical of their Olympic coverage,” he added.

In an article published on Tuesday in The Independent, Adams said: “I’m still awaiting a detailed explanation from Twitter as to why my account was immediately suspended.”

NBC Sports later released a statement saying: “We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives.”

The uproar around the brief suspension is the latest setback for the micro-blogging service since a January statement about country-specific censorship first led to a flurry of comments by the San Francisco-based service’s 100 million active userbase.