Twitter's decision to suspend the account of The Independent's Los Angeles correspondent, Guy Adams, was a spectacular own goal. Mr Adams's supposed crime was to encourage his followers on the site to email an NBC exec to complain that the network's coverage of the Olympics was subject to unnecessary delay.

Twitter claimed the tweet violated its rules about publishing private email addresses. Hardly. The address Mr Adams tweeted was a very public NBC one, only as private as anything else openly available on the internet. Worse still, it now seems the complaint came not from NBC, but from Twitter itself, a commercial partner of the network.

Twitter has now seen sense and reversed the ban. But the fact that the company appears to place commercial advantage above its commitment to free expression can only call into question its integrity.