Free Guy Adams: Twitter lifts its ban on the British journalist

LONDON -- After a firestorm of criticism on both sides of the pond, the Twitter account of the Independent’s Hollywood-based reporter Guy Adams was back in the game Tuesday.

Suspension, lifted.

There would be no explanatory video for the reason, but a top Twitter executive posted a mea culpa of sorts on his blog. The site had shut down Adams account after he tweeted the corporate email address of a top NBC Olympic Sports executive.

Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, delivered a long explanation, in part, saying:

“We’ve seen a lot of commentary about whether we should have considered a corporate email address to be private information. There are many individuals who may use their work email address for a variety of personal reasons — and some may not. Our Trust and Safety team does not have insight into the use of every user’s email address, and we need a policy that we can implement across all of our users in every instance.

“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.

“As I stated earlier, we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are. This behavior is not acceptable and undermines the trust our users have in us. 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. As of earlier today, the account has been unsuspended, and we will actively work to ensure this does not happen again.”

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