Twitter alerted NBC to journalist's tweets criticizing its Olympics coverage

One of the tweets urged his followers to send their views to Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics. Mr Adams subsequently published Mr Zenkel’s corporate email address and a complaint was filed by NBC.

But in an email to The Daily Telegraph, Christopher McCloskey, NBC Sport’s vice-president of communications, said Twitter had actually contacted the network’s social media department to alert them to Mr Adams’s tweets.

“Our social media dept was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it,” he wrote.

An email asking for further detail and whether this was normal Twitter policy was not returned from NBC or Twitter.