REPORTER SUSPENDED BY TWITTER: “WHY?”

Guy Adams, the Los Angeles bureau chief for the London Independent, may have had his Twitter account reinstated after the uproar that followed its being suspended, but NBC and Twitter are still being battered in the press for yanking it in the first place. Forbes magazine commented that the incident “reflected poorly on [NBC’s] stance on free speech and garnered much more negative press for them than they could have imagined when they first complained.” Randy Dryer, a Salt Lake City lawyer and law professor, who served on the Salt Lake Olympic Committee board of trustees, commented on the Forbes website that NBC has revealed itself as “a thin-skinned organization which cannot tolerate any criticism and will exercise its considerable financial power to suppress its critics.” Media commentator Jeff Jarvis assailed Twitter for its action. “If we cannot rely on Twitter to protect our free speech, then it is no platform at all,” he said. Adams himself commented on the Independent that “Twitter has not yet explained how exactly the tweet that led to my suspension is supposed to have broken its ‘privacy policy.'” It had originally complained about Adams’s inclusion of the email address of an NBC exec in his tweet, but Adams observed that he obtained the address via a Google search and that it is not the exec’s private email address but his corporate address at NBC. Adams also noted that NBC and Twitter are running a cross promotion during the Olympics and asked whether the “decision to suspend my account was motivated by [the relationship].”