Twitter (sort of) apologized for suspending the account of Guy Adams, correspondent for the London-based daily The Independent, who echoed the sentiments of many Olympic viewers by going on a Twitter rant about NBC's time delay-saddled and arguably lackluster Olympics coverage. After tweeting the (public) work email address of NBC's Olympics President Gary Zenkel, Twitter temporarily yanked his account for allegedly violating its privacy policy. The San Francisco-based social media company has now publicly apologized for the apparent error in judgement.

In part of a written statement explaining trust and safety policies and procedure, Alex Macgillivray, Twitter's General Counsel for Product/IP, explains:

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, [Adams'] account has been unsuspended, and we will actively work to ensure this does not happen again.

For his part, Adams has wasted no time in making a name for himself using the minor kerfuffle. Behold: