Welcome to the Twittolympics

Twitter found itself at the center of brief but intense media debacle this week when it banned a reporter from its service after he tweeted out comments critical of one of its business partners. You probably know the story, but here are the essentials in case you missed them.

U.K. journalist Guy Adams issues series of tweets ranting about NBC’s failure to broadcast Olympic events live in the United States, resulting in everyone knowing who won six hours before they get to see it happen. Included in said rants is the corporate email address of Gary Zenker, the NBC executive presumably in charge of this decision. Somehow, someone at Twitter sees the tweet and suggests NBC file a complaint about it. (Twitter and NBC are business partners for the 2012 games.) Complaint is filed, journalist’s account is immediately suspended, and — boom — instant controversy.

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Why? Because there’s nothing the media — myself included — likes better than to talk about itself, especially when it feels a good case of self-righteousness coming on. But this one was especially juicy because it was broadcast media (NBC) and social media (Twitter) ganging up on a member of print and Web media (The Independent).

Twitter claimed Adams violated its rules by tweeting out a private email address. Adams claimed the email address was hardly private, being both a rote corporate address, easily guessable by anyone with half a brain, and because it had already appeared elsewhere on the Web. (Twitter’s rules quite explicitly state if an email address has been published elsewhere, it’s no longer considered private.)

Insanely, it took Twitter some four days to do the obvious thing and reinstate Adams, which would have put the matter to rest had the company done it three days earlier. Twitter chief legal beagle Alex Macgillivray posted an apology, of sorts — not for banishing Adams, but for the Twitter employee who took it upon him- or herself to notify NBC and urge them to complain. He wrote:

[W]e 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… 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.

Though Macgillivray’s post is hardly a beacon of clarity about what Twitter was thinking, it appears the reason Twitter reinstated Adams was because NBC rescinded its complaint, not because the company was wrong to ban Adams in the first place. Which raises the question: How exactly does one take back a complaint like that? Is this service only available to special business partners of Twitter?

Adams has more questions. In a piece for The Journalism Foundation about the affair (shall we just call it Adamsgate?), he writes:

[W]e still don’t know what Twitter was doing monitoring my status updates in the first place. No-one knows the name of the employee who first alerted NBC, or why they did what they did. No-one knows if they’ve been reprimanded for breaching their firm’s core values. No-one knows who, in the site’s “Trust and Safety” team dealt with NBC’s complaint, or by what logic they arrived at the decision to suspend me. So far as I’m aware, no Twitter spokesman has appeared on the airwaves to answer any substantive questions about the case.

Twitter is obviously a private company and can do whatever the heck it wants, including suspending the free accounts it offers users. But given Twitter’s part in the Arab Spring uprisings, as well as the role it has assumed in news reporting, many people have come to think of it more like a public utility. They trust Twitter to be an impartial delivery mechanism, the same way they trust their phones and cable TV lines. But maybe they shouldn’t.

As a media company, NBC is clearly pretty dense about how to handle the media. The smart approach would have been to contact Adams directly, ask him to please delete that tweet, and engage him in a dialog about its Olympic coverage. Instead, the network decided to bring the hammer down. Is it any surprise why NBC is mired in fourth place among the major TV networks?

The youthful Adams doesn’t exactly come off smelling sweetly here, either. Tweeting out Zenker’s email address was childish. And after being told of his reinstatement, he quipped to a CNN producer: “I feel like Nelson Mandela walking through the streets of Cape Town, circa 1990,” and quoted his own witty riposte in a piece for The Independent.

Can you say douchetard? I knew you could.

The good news: Now that this is finally over, we can all get back to more important things, like whether Usain Bolt can pull off another amazing victory in the 100-meter dash.

Do you still trust Twitter? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com. And no, you won’t be limited to 140 characters.

This article, “Welcome to the Twittolympics,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.