Twitter Reinstates Journo's Account: 'We Did Mess Up'

Twitter has lifted the suspension of a journalist's account and apologized for a breach of its own policy, notes Marketing Land. The flap occurred when Guy Adams of the British newspaper the Independent got so peeved at NBC's Olympics coverage that he tweeted the corporate email of one of the execs in charge. Soon after, Twitter suspended his account. In a blog post today, Twitter explained that the suspension never should have happened. "We want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up."

It seems that a crew from Twitter working with NBC spotted the tweet first and encouraged the network to file a complaint, apparently on the grounds that tweeting the exec's email address was a breach of privacy. NBC did, and the account got blocked. "We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is—whether a business partner, celebrity, or friend," writes Alex Macgillivray, Twitter's general counsel. "We will actively work to ensure this does not happen again." He added that the company is working up guidelines on whether corporate emails should be off-limits to tweeters. Meanwhile, Adams is once again tweeting here. (More Twitter stories.)