Twitter, Censorship and...the Olympics

For some odd reason* Twitter chose to alert NBC about a British journalist who was being rude about NBC's coverage of the Olympics, so that NBC could then complain and Twitter could then ban him. He was banned because he suggested that those who did not like the Olympic coverage should email a specific NBC executive, and then quoted his email on Twitter. Now that's just the sort of pro-activeness you want your social network to take against you when you want to campaign against Big Brands - not. He did seem to be the sacrificial lamb though - you should have seen the Twitterstream, it was far, far more than one person who was being rude! The Atlantic is as good as any summary of the main issues of the story:

Let's stipulate that Twitter banning journalist Guy Adams for posting NBC executive's Gary Zenkel's corporate email address was a very bad idea. They have begun fixing the damage they did by reinstating his account. NBC retracted its complaint, according to Adams.

Now, whether it was a craven decision or merely bad judgment comes down to whether Zenkel's NBC email address is public or private information. In today's world, this is not as obvious a question as it might appear. (It may help to imagine that you are Gary Zenkel and you are the one getting hundreds of nastygrams from people with axes to grind.)

On the one hand, as Adams himself has pointed out, anyone with the Google can find it and it is now available on thousands of web pages, though not nearly as widely before.

Exactly - finding someone's corporate email address is hardly rocket science. Anyway, cue hullabaloo (on Twitter and elsewhere), cue Twitter apology:

That said, 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.

No doubt the fault can be blamed on The Intern....

But you kinda know where this is all going to go, don't you. This won't be the last time.....the interests of Social Networks looking for Ad funding, and those Social Networks' own users, are not aligned here. There probably needs to be some form of regulated code of conduct, weg email addresses fine, house addresses not fine etc etc.

* Did we mantion that Twitter and NBC are business partners - sorry, how remiss of us