Bill Simmons' Twitter Suspended: ESPN Put in Him in Timeout for 2 Weeks

Bill Simmons, ESPN's most popular Twitter personality, once shunned the medium but now clocks in at well over 1,000,000 followers. But it looks like he'll be seeing significantly less Twitter action over the next two weeks: he's had his Tweeting privileges yanked by ESPN for some aggressive remarks he made to ESPN-affiliated radio station WEEI in Boston.

Well, kind of -- he's still apparently allowed to tweet about his book tour, which has only one stop remaining in Las Vegas for early December.

You can still see the offending Tweets here and here, but in case Simmons has banned you from following him too, here's what he said:

Hey WEEI: You were wrong, I did a Boston interview today. With your competition. Rather give them ratings over deceitful scumbags like you.

Additionally, Simmons referred to Dennis and Callahan The Big Show with the Big O and Glenn Ordway (update via the comments and this site) as "washed-up athletes" and "fat" while stating that he heard they were bashing him. TBL was asking rhetorical questions (and combing through Tweets) yesterday, and ESPN's Editor-in-Chief Rob King has since confirmed that Simmons has been punished, via this blog post that he linked to on his personal Twitter account.

We have internal guidelines designed to inform how we discuss the topic of sports media. These guidelines are important us, because they help maintain the credibility with which ESPN operates.

No one knows the guidelines better than Bill Simmons, and he customarily works within these standards. He also understands, as does everyone else at ESPN, that we regard these guidelines as being equally important when participating in social media.

While it's unfortunate - and sometimes painful - that not everyone outside of ESPN chooses to play by such rules, we choose to hold ourselves to higher standards. Regardless of the provocation, Bill's communication regarding WEEI fell short of those standards. So we've taken appropriate measures.

Those measures being the two-week suspension, which is kind of like a parent putting their honor roll kid in timeout for 15 minutes because he called a promiscuous female classmate a "strumpet." Or something. The point wasn't that Simmons was being offensive or even rude, it's that ESPN had to take some kind of action, otherwise they were opening the door for other employees to abuse social media and then having to dole out what might be perceived as unfair punishment.