Twitter is not apologizing for suspending Adams. In fact, in its lengthy explanation of "our approach to Trust & Safety and private information," it very much takes the position that it acted correctly and followed protocol in suspending Adams, reiterating again and again in its explanation that NBC received no special treatment in the way that Twitter enforced its rules. ("In all cases, whether the user is the head of a major corporation, a celebrity, or a regular user, we require a report to be filed at our abusive users webform...") Even Adams' reinstatement wasn't because Twitter bended the rules in favor of common sense or to bow to pressure. "Additionally, if we receive a notice from the complainant rescinding their original complaint, the account is unsuspended." Which is what happened — NBC rescinded its complaint and Adams' account was reinstated. In fact, Twitter frames the entire blog post as something in which it is following its rules to the T. ("We normally don’t address matters pertaining to individual accounts for the privacy of the account, but here the relevant communications are now public.)" In other words, "No rules broken here, nope!"

This also neatly deals with the Justin Bieber problem — that Twitter didn't suspend Bieber for tweeting a teenager's phone number to his 4.5 million followers — because "we need a report from the person whose private information has been posted, or someone who is able to legally act on their behalf." (If no one reported it, Twitter can't do anything.)

The key point, for most critics of Twitter, turns on whether or not Gary Zenkel's email was "private information." Twitter's own rules state that "if information was previously posted or displayed elsewhere on the Internet prior to being put on Twitter, it is not a violation of this policy." And Zenkel's address was indeed on the internet before Adams posted it, in at least one location. So by a strict reading of that rule, Adams did not violate Twitter's private information policy. It was not, however, as Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land shows, "widely available" on Google. And I can tell you that "widely available on Google" is the standard under which Twitter operated, unfairly or otherwise. (The underlying fuzzy logic is that otherwise I can post private information on my blog, then tweet it, then point back to my blog and then say it was on the internet before it was on Twitter.)

Obviously, if Twitter's not going to follow its own published rules to the letter, it should update them to reflect whatever rules it will follow, even if it is, "We reserve the right to do whatever we want." (It doesn't have to. It owns the network. It makes the rules. But it should follow its own rules if it wants users to trust it.)

Either way, Twitter admits no wrongdoing on this point:

We’ve seen a lot of commentary about whether we should have considered a corporate email address to be private information. There are many individuals who may use their work email address for a variety of personal reasons — and they may not. Our Trust and Safety team does not have insight into the use of every user’s email address, and we need a policy that we can implement across all of our users in every instance.