Facebook Admits Blocking WikiLeaks' DNC Email Links, But Won't Say Why (thenextweb.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has admitted it blocked links to WikiLeaks' DNC email dump, but the company has yet to explain why. WikiLeaks has responded to the censorship via Twitter, writing: "For those facing censorship on Facebook etc when trying to post links directly to WikiLeaks #DNCLeak try using archive.is." When SwiftOnSecurity tweeted, "Facebook has an automated system for detecting spam/malicious links, that sometimes have false positives. /cc," Facebook's Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos replied with, "It's been fixed." As for why there was a problem in the first place, we don't know. Nate Swanner from The Next Web writes, "It's possible its algorithm incorrectly identified them as malicious, but it's another negative mark on the company's record nonetheless. WikiLeaks is a known entity, not some torrent dumping ground. The WikiLeaks link issue has reportedly been fixed, which is great -- but also not really the point. The fact links to the archive was blocked at all suggests there's a very tight reign on what's allowed on Facebook across the board, and that's a problem." A Facebook representative provided a statement to Gizmodo: "Like other services, our anti-spam systems briefly flagged links to these documents as unsafe. We quickly corrected this error on Saturday evening."

Comments

The party line

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like they were censoring conservative news stories.

http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006

No accident...the party line.

Welcome to Libertarianism

[mi]

They are a private company. They can filter, block, promote any speech that they want.

I always said the same about TV and radio companies, but various Statists from FCC and FEC down to Slashdot cowards always disagreed.

Good to see some turnaround in public opinion towards liberty. Except, oh, wait, TV, radio, and even web-sites may not be able to do what they want... Even texting in support of a candidate may be illegal.

Unless, obviously, the candidate is from the Party of Government. For a few decades we had something called Fairness Doctrine, which allowed FCC to enforce "fairness". Libertarians fought it, but at least, with it on the books, one could formally complain against "unfair" coverage. Not any more — with only 7% of journalists being Republicans, the game is played with only one set of goal-posts...