Twitter suspended the account of Guy Adams, the Los Angeles correspondent of The Independent, for publishing the corporate email address of an NBC executive during the 2012 Olympics. Adams had been one of the loudest critics of NBC’s coverage of the games, and the suspension produced thousands of angry #nbcfail messages along with suspicion about the motive. Dan Gillmor noted that Twitter was a commercial partner of NBC for the games, which “raises reasonable suspicions about Twitter’s motives.” Adams himself suggested that “my account was suspended after Twitter decided, at its own behest, to get in touch with a commercial partner in order to encourage them to have a hostile journalist removed from the Twitter-sphere.”
The suspension mattered beyond the individual case because of the gap it exposed. Services like Twitter get treated as public utilities: the place breaking news arrives, the place a revolution in the Middle East is followed, the place a good joke lands. They are private companies with their own commercial interests, and they hold a weak position in one respect — without millions of people posting millions of updates the service is worth nothing to anyone.
Because users create that value, they acquire a sense of ownership over it, and read the removal of an account as corporate censorship of a space they built. Nothing about that tension was resolved in 2012, and it recurs each time a platform takes an account down.