Twitter and their double standard...

Guy Adams is a L.A. based journalist.  Spike Lee is a world-famous director.  Justin Beiber is a world-famous singer.  C.J. Wilson is a professional baseball player. 

What do they have in common?  They have all violated the Terms of Service in how they used their Twitter Accounts.  But only Adams, who tweeted the email address of an NBC executive (which was actually not private, personal information) had his Twitter account suspended.  Now, Twitter has unsuspended his account, around 48 hours after it was originally suspended.  But that doesn't alter the fact that they shouldn't have done it in the first place.

Spike Lee took a lot of flack for tweeting what he thought was the home address of accused murderer George Zimmerman, when the address was actually someone else's.  He has apologized, and reportedly settled a civil claim against him by the person whose address it was.  Justin Beiber tweeted the personal phone number of one of his "enemies" and that person was innundated by over 25,000 texts from fans of the Beib.  C.J. Wilson took umbrage at comments made by a former teammate and tweeted his personal phone number.

None of the celebrities above had their Twitter accounts suspended.  Perhaps those who were victimized didn't file formal complaints against those who violated their privacy.  But that isn't and shouldn't be the standard.  The standard is, you violate someone's privacy, you should face consequences.  Twitter only suspended the account of Adams, because he was being critical of NBC's coverage of the Olympics, and NBC and Twitter are in partnership in how the social media site will handle tweets about the Olympics.

Twitter was wrong.  Hopefully they've learnd from the experience and won't make that same mistake in the future.