Twitter Boots Critic of NBC For Tweeting Exec's Email Address 104
netbuzz writes "Guy Adams, a Los Angeles-based correspondent for The Independent of London, had his Twitter account suspended today, allegedly for having violated a Twitter privacy policy when he tweeted the workplace email address of an NBC Sports executive. The Internet is abuzz with accusations – no make that assumptions – that Twitter muzzled Adams because Adams was tweeting up a storm of protest over NBC's coverage of the Games. However, Twitter says it was because it prohibits the tweeting of 'non-public, personal email addresses.' Whether Adams did that or not appears debatable."
Update: 07/31 17:48 GMT by S : Adams's Twitter account has been reinstated.
Hey Twitter, (Score:4, Insightful)
#fuckyou
Re:HMMM (Score:5, Insightful)
freedom will be televised during highest paid ad time slots
bad summary (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not even clear if posting the email is against their TOS even if it is private... and it isn't private. Their email naming scheme is clear and the full address has been published before.
This is corporate asshattery.... there isn't any doubt about it to anyone but the poster. NBC and Twitter are partners and they muzzled a critic for a trumped up infraction.
There hasn't been discussion about it here, but the whole NBC coverage is an idiotic, jingoistic, and technical mess. Read #nbcfail on twitter yourself (I know... slashdotters are too cool for twitter) and you'll see it yourself.
Re:FSCK the olympics (Score:5, Insightful)
The Olympics take advantage of tax payers by building arenas that never pay off, they don't compensate athletes, the stars of their show, for their hard work and all the while, the IOC gets billions from ads and tv deals.
The athletes work for no pay, the city builds the stadiums and provides staff and security so what do the IOC spend their $$$ on???
Its a huge scam, screw them!
It's worse than that, I'm afraid.
Like a mythological vampire, the Olympics can only come inside if invited(in fact, given the competition each round, you pretty much have to grovel at the IOC's feet to get one). So, if your city finds itself in the unfortunate position of hosting an Olympic event, you are witnessing the end-stage political rot where whoever is in charge has (in the face of considerable competition) to knowingly invite a hugely expensive debacle to town in order to drum up some PR and have an excuse to farm out a bunch of sweetheart contracts on top of whatever part of the city doesn't meet their approval.
If the Olympics were some sort of outside force, imposed by IOC occupation troopers, it would actually be less pernicious. Alas, it is a parasitic organism that shows up to produce the especially grotesque symptoms of uncontrolled unaccountability in local governance, rather like all those exotic cancers and fungal infections that show up in immunocompromised patients.
This isn't to say that burning down the IOC would be a bad thing, of course, plenty of blame to go around; but your only real solution involves wheeling in the guillotine at the municipal level...
Re:the email add. was out there. (Score:2, Insightful)
that's the debate if you're wondering.
if it wasn't public, how did he have it? personal relation? but no need for that since it was published on a blog.
and it's an email address for a fucking nbc exec, not for some secret agent...
and why it's a story is that there's moneyflow between olympics, nbc and twitter due to them doing big co-operation around the games.
and why nbc sucks is that they edited the opening ceremony and showed it time delayed(the reasoning is that americans are too stupid for the un-edited version, basically).
Personally I think it doesn't matter what type of address it is, we all know that this type of activity os just inciting harassment. Corporations have channels for feedback and you can always continue to rant online, but targeting a single person directly is imo not cool.
Re:the email add. was out there. (Score:5, Insightful)
and why nbc sucks is that they edited the opening ceremony and showed it time delayed(the reasoning is that americans are too stupid for the un-edited version, basically).
It wasn't just that. It was the incessant inane commentary when they should have shut their traps and let the image do the talking. It was cutting out some of the best parts. It was spoiling the carefully crafted continuity with a constant bombardment of commercials. It was not knowing/giving a shit who Tim Berners Lee was and leaving it to the audience to google him; how ironic is that?
All of the people griping about how "bad" the opening ceremony was have two things in common: 1 they're American, and 2 They watched it on NBC.
I watched it on the BBC's feed and was blown away by it. I was a bit shocked when I started seeing comment threads from yanks complaining about it being "boring", I was wondering if they'd watched the same show as me.
Re:bad summary (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not even clear if posting the email is against their TOS even if it is private... and it isn't private. Their email naming scheme is clear and the full address has been published before.
"Private" doesn't mean "uncrackable". NBC apparently hadn't published it before, so regardless of how simplistic their email naming scheme, the email was still private.
This is corporate asshattery.... there isn't any doubt about it to anyone but the poster. NBC and Twitter are partners and they muzzled a critic for a trumped up infraction.
A conspiracy theory like that only makes sense if NBC and Twitter are muzzling other critics... But wait:
Read #nbcfail on twitter yourself
Apparently, not only are they not muzzling critics, said criticism is indexed and easily searchable.
We can argue about the Streisand effect and the wisdom of the account suspension all we want, but to claim that Twitter is engaging in censorship over a viewpoint seems to be contradicted by the wide number of posts they're hosting with that same viewpoint.
Re:the email add. was out there. (Score:5, Insightful)
Again.. this ignores the fact that no one can find this rule in the TOS.
Re:HMMM (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:the email add. was out there. (Score:4, Insightful)
Again.. this ignores the fact that no one can find this rule in the TOS.
I am sure it is in the new TOS as of right now. Pray that Twitter don't alter the TOS any further.
Re:You'd think people would learn.. (Score:2, Insightful)