The Internet is a hostile environment for message control

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The Internet is a hostile environment for message control


By Kate Heartfield, The Ottawa Citizen August 1, 2012
It’s in Twitter’s commercial interests to act as if it had no commercial interests. The company forgot that, this week, and let the mask slip. It acted like the money-making operation it is trying to be, tried to protect its brand, and its brand suffered a blow.

I love the Internet. It’s a hostile environment for message control.

The screw-up itself didn’t last long and was relatively minor. Guy Adams, a journalist for The Independent, had been tweeting about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, including its decision to tape-delay events rather than show them live. It’s an understatement to call his tweets “critical.” They included such phrases as “NBC are utter, utter bastards.” But the tweet that apparently got his account suspended was this one: “The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven’t started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think!” And it ended with Zenkel’s NBC email address.

Twitter and NBC have a partnership regarding Olympic cross-promotion. According to general counsel Alex Macgillivray, writing on Twitter’s own blog, here’s what happened next: “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.”

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports/Int ... z22VUUqGzD