Twitter: I need more than 140 characters to say what a let down you are

Up until recently, I didn't really use Twitter. My feeling was, twitters never win and winners never twit. (Not really. I just wanted to say that.)

But lately I have been getting into it. Mainly because you can do an end run around the six media outlets that embargo and export all the information. Twitter, I thought, was the people's voice.

I originally signed up during the Green Revolution to get eyewitness accounts of the revolution in Iran. Even Iran, which has a very good record for quelling dissent, could not snuff the collective voices of its people, getting their messages out to the world on Twitter.

I found out today, that Iran has met its match when it comes to totalitarian regimes suppressing free speech.  

Guy Adams works as a writer for The Independent, a national newspaper in Great Britain. He lives in Los Angeles. Throughout the Olympics, he's taken to Twitter and ripped NBC repeatedly for its coverage of the Games in America.

Namely, he's criticized the network's reliance on using tape delays, a frustration shared by millions of viewers.

Only in a marriage of old media and social media, Guy Adams no longer has a Twitter account. It was suspended Tuesday, and both NBC and Twitter ought to be humiliated by their thin-skinned, heavy-handed, and essentially pointless behavior.

What could he have possibly said to invite such a harsh measure as suspension? Surely, he must have threatened someone or incited violence, right?

Here are some of his tweets:

"Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its [sic] acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?" he wrote in one.

"Matt Lauer: ‘Madagascar, a location indelibly associated with a couple of recent animated movies,'" he mocked on another.

Adams encouraged Lauer "to shut up" and called out Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, as the "moronic exec behind the time delay." And he said Zenkel should be fired.

After being suspended he filed a story for the independent:

Adams wrote that after filing an article critical of NBC's coverage, he checked his Twitter account only to find it had been suspended. When he inquired why, he received the following response: "Your Twitter account has been suspended for posting an individual's private information such as private email address."

With that, the account was gone. And a controversy was born.

Adams said he emailed Rachel Bremer, Twitter's head of European PR, to dispute that he broke Twitter's rules. The email address Adams tweeted wasn't a private address belonging to Zenkel, Adams wrote, but a corporate one attainable to anyone with access to Google.

"It's no more 'private' than the address I'm emailing you from right now," Adams wrote Bremer. "Either way, [it's] quite worrying that NBC, whose parent company are an Olympic sponsor, are apparently trying (and, in this case, succeeding) in shutting down the Twitter accounts of journalists who are critical of their Olympic coverage."

We knew the revolution would not be televised, but the internet offered hope that it would be digitized. With this shortsighted suspension, and corporate thuggery, we now know it many no longer be twitterized.