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Guy Adams has only been a First Amendment hero for a few days, and already he has a career highlight: A CNN producer cautioning him against comparing himself to Nelson Mandela when Twitter reinstated his account Tuesday. Adams lost his tweeting privileges after he broadcast the work email address of NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel Friday; NBC confirmed it had filed a complaint about the tweet after Twitter alerted the network to its existence, an action Twitter apologized for Tuesday.

Adams focuses less on Twitter's complicity than on the inconsistency with which it applied its rules, repeating his contention that Zenkel's email was easily found on the Internet. (That's a stretch, Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan wrote Tuesday.) He lists several times the microblogging service didn't act: MIA tweeting Lynne Hirschberg's phone number, Spike Lee tweeting the wrong address for George Zimmerman.

But as Matt Buchanan writes in BuzzFeed, Twitter acts only when it receives a complaint. Twitter General Counsel Alex McGillivray reiterated in an apology to Adams that the social network "should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is." That's why it apologized for narcing out Adams to NBC but not for suspending him.

It wants the precedent that this has set — monitoring a tweet and then acting upon a violation — to be erased, because it wants never to have that responsibility on its hands, no matter who asks, whether it's a celebrity or corporate partner, or perhaps more crucially, the government.

The not-totally-clear question of whether Zenkel's email was easily available, Buchanan writes, suggests Twitter should update its rules to "reflect whatever rules it will follow, even if it is, 'We reserve the right to do whatever we want.' " (more...)

Sports Business Daily | The Independent | The Wall Street Journal
After a two-day suspension of his Twitter account, Guy Adams tweeted Tuesday afternoon:

Oh. My Twitter account appears to have been un-suspended. Did I miss much while I was away?

— Guy Adams (@guyadams) July 31, 2012

Twitter suspended the NBC Olympics critic, a journalist for the British newspaper The Independent, this weekend based on a complaint from NBC that Adams had tweeted the email address of a network executive. NBC vice president for communications Chris McCloskey said Twitter alerted the network, its partner for the Olympic games, to Adams' tweets. Soon after the complaint, Adams was suspended.

Adams quotes an email from Twitter today that says, "We have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request ... Therefore your account has been unsuspended."

An unnamed NBC spokesman gave The Wall Street Journal this explanation today: "Our interest was in protecting our executive, not suspending the user from Twitter. We didn't initially understand the repercussions of our complaint, but now that we do, we have rescinded it." (more...)

The Telegraph | The Independent | The New York Times | AP
In an email to the U.K.'s Telegraph, NBC vice president for communications Chris McCloskey said Twitter flagged Guy Adams' critical tweets about the network's Olympics coverage to NBC's social media department, writes Amy Willis.

“Our social media dept was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it,” he wrote.

On Monday, NBC confirmed it had filed a complaint against Adams, whose account was suspended after he tweeted the work email address of NBC's president of Olympics coverage, Gary Zenkel. In an email to Poynter, McCloskey (whose email address is available publicly) said the network had "nothing further to add." He included NBC's original statement:

“We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives. According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy. Twitter alone levies discipline.”

Twitter declined comment to The Telegraph and The Guardian, whose Josh Halliday noted the microblogging service has a partnership with NBC during the games. (more...)