Twitter to UK journo: sorry we ratted you out, but your suspension was valid

Twitter has issued a statement apologising for its suspension of UK journalist Guy Adams. Well sort of.

The social network maintains that it followed most of its own procedures properly when it decided to suspend Adams after he tweeted the email address of an executive at US broadcaster NBC:

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.

Right, so what Twitter’s essentially saying is that it’s sorry some rogue members of its team ran off to NBC to tell them about the Tweet, but that it’s not sorry it suspended Adams…because some rogue members of its team ratted him out to NBC. Glad that’s sorted then.