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Comment by rickmb | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's explanation includes the word "apologize", but never states cleary what exactly they are apologizing for. Encouraging NBC to file a complaint? A complaint they still claim is justified? You can't apologize and say you did the right thing at the same time. "Sorry I hit you, but you had it coming."

They continue to defend the decision to suspend the account because it contained "private" information, claiming they can't make the distinction (big.boss at bigco.com, gimme a break...), even though by now various media have dug up plenty of incidents where publishing unambiguously private information has not lead to suspension.

And to add insult to injury: the account wasn't restored because Twitter reversed their decision, but because NBC retracted the complaint.

Seems to me like NBC giveth and NBC taketh away. Twitter merely apologizes for, well, what exactly? Being the messenger?

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The blog post clearly apologizes for contacting NBC about the tweet content.

"we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are. This behavior is not acceptable and undermines the trust our users have in us. We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content"

Also, the blog post says the account would have been restored as soon as Guy Adams responded to their email and acknowledged the TOS. Complaint retraction or not.

They also state that they neither proactively reported the content (they encouraged NBC to do so), nor did they remove it on behalf of NBC (they claim independent action based on their policy).

In other words, they deny having done what they consider not acceptable, so that can't be what they are apologizing for.

"I absolutely didn't hit you. I'm apologize. I never hit people, that would be unacceptable."

Doesn't make any sense. They just stuck the word "apologize" in between saying how they did nothing wrong and denouncing something they claim they didn't do in the first place.

So the account would have been restored if Guy Adams did as they told him. That's just the standard "he shouldn't have resisted arrest" line of deflection.

Stating how right you are and always have been is quite the opposite of an apology. It's not even a well constructed "non-apology apology", it's just randomly inserting the word "apologize".

"we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are."

Except when they do.

I'm having a hard time seeing any aspect of this in which Twitter was right.

Well, they're always going to be right in the "because we can" aspect.

It is called a "Non-Apology Apology" and is not new to this field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology

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