The chance of Twitter to ever become a way of delivering news content was scuppered by the fact that the service censors users upon the request of the broadcasters.
According to media reports, Twitter has suspended a British journalist who posted critical tweets of NBC’s Olympics coverage. After NBC complained, independent hack Guy Adams was censored by the service.
The statistics say that the social media network received thousands of angry tweets after the Twitter feed of Guy Adams of the Independent had gone. In response, NBC has confirmed that the company complained to Twitter after Guy Adams had made the email address of one of its senior bosses available to public, pointing out that this was a violation of the privacy policy of the social service.
The address in question belonged to Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics. In his tweet, Adams suggested that people should complain to Zenkel about the TV network’s delayed broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
Guy Adams responded that the email address wasn’t a private one, but rather a corporate account, so shutting his Tweeter feed down looked like an attempt from NBC to silence Adams’ coverage.
The journalist believes that NBC were money grabbers for refusing to broadcast the opening of the Games live because the company wanted to maximize its advertising revenue during prime time. As a result, the United States had to watch the opening ceremony 6 hours behind the rest of the world.
In addition, when NBC finally broadcasted, they made a number of offensive remarks about the British: for instance, a commentator claimed he had never heard of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the Internet. The critics were surprised that some American journalists even knew where the United Kingdom is.
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