Guy Adams' Twitter Account Restored Day After Ban

12:34 PM PDT 7/31/2012 by Jordan Zakarin

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The LA editor of "The Independent" newspaper had his tweeting privileges revoked after complaining about NBC's Olympic coverage.

Twitter could not silence Guy Adams -- and it may have been more trouble than it was worth to try to do so.

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After significant public backlash, the network has reinstated Adams' account, offering a brief message that explained that "the complainant retract[ed] their original request."

Adams, the Los Angeles editor of Britain's Independent newspaper, originally had his Twitter account suspended after sending out a spate of messages that were critical of NBC's tape-delayed Olympics broadcasts. The social network platform sent him a message indicating that they had put him in the penalty box for publishing an NBC executive's private email, but as Adams noted in a blog post, he had tweeted out a corporate, publicly-accessible address.

The company also told Adams that they had only suspended his account after being contacted by NBC, with whom they are partners in a social media effort new to this summer's games.

"As a journalist, you know you are doing your job properly when you manage to upset rich, powerful and entitled people who are used to getting their own way," Adams wrote in an op-ed for The Independent. "And you know you've really got under their skin when they pursue censorship, the avenue of last resort since time immemorial.

"The internet era is meant to be different, though," he continued. "Thanks to Twitter, and Google and every other medium dedicated to the free exchange of information, the world is supposed to have changed. That's why the Arab Spring happened; it's why Justin Bieber happened. And its why, regardless of its comparative frivolity, NBC's successful attempt to suspend a journalist from a social networking site sets an ugly precedent."

Later, NBC said in a statement, "Our interest was in protecting our executive, not suspending the user from Twitter. We didn’t initially understand the repercussions of our complaint, but now that we do, we have rescinded it.”