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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."
Facebook is in the tank for the DNC and Hillary. Just look at who all the big-wigs their support with their contribution dollars.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
The illegal / immoral / ethically questionable activity will continue until someone catches it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Clinton is the corporate candidate this cycle. Why would corporations want to harm the candidate that's fighting for them?
Just like they were censoring conservative news stories.
http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006
No accident...the party line.
When will people wake up and realize the fix is in? You know those ties between the media and the Democrats that the right complained about for years? Have you realized yet that the question about using facebook to prevent a Trump presidency wasn't rhetorical?
Bernie's supporters have started to wake up and realize that they are just as excluded as the right. The only difference now is that things are being exposed in plain text for the world to see. Only big business and congress have worse credibility ratings that the media.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/159...
Wake up sheeple.
Being blatantly partisan would harm their business (by insulting their Republican and Independent user base). As a public company, they have a fiscal duty to not place personal political beliefs above the interests of the company (or a shareholder lawsuit might ensue).
If there is a "Filter out any negative Hillary Clinton news until we get enough pressure to release it" filter, then they are setting themselves up for trouble.
"our anti-spam systems briefly flagged links to these documents as unsafe."
The truth has a long tradition of being considered dangerous.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Sure they can. And we can point and say "look at the Clinton shills." What's your point?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The idiots should have left well enough alone. There was no way they could prevent people from hearing about it, anyway.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
They like the DNC PRO H1B stance
Just curious, did you defend Microsoft as a private Monopoly? Do you realize that Facebook has over 1 billion people on their platform and that they effectively have a monopoly on social media? Do you think it's okay for a monopoly to abuse their position to promote a particular ideology? Would you feel the same way if they promoted right wing content instead?
Just sayin'
they can do no wrong?
Of course. The exact same phenomena occurred when we learned about their biased grooming of their news feed. All of the sudden corporate sovereignty was paramount! Never had so much love for Facebook appeared among the cubical trolls of Slashdot.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
They are a private company. They can filter, block, promote any speech that they want.
They are also private emails belonging to a private organization, many of which could have copyright belonging to the authors of the emails, that were stolen in by someone making unauthorized access to their computers.
I can imagine what a sane corporate lawyer would advise as a safe course of action.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I don't get what the fuss is all about. Facebook is not a media outlet, their systems filter a lot more than this and no one cares. The leaks themselves are not particularly interesting; they did not disclose what people already had known about the internal politics of any american party. What is really worrisome here is not that Facebook is censoring (let me reiterate they censor a lot more) as there are many media outlets that people can easily obtain the leaks, but that Wikileaks are playing into the Russian government hands. Assange grudge against the USA is making Wikileaks extremely politicised; witness the timing of the leaks. Correct me if I am wrong, as I might misremember this, Wikileaks did not want to leak the Panama documents as they showed predominantly Putin's corruption.
So your theory is that FB understands nothing about social networks and has never heard of the Streisand Effect.
Slow the story for a few days and it doesn't disrupt the news coverage of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. The goal is not necessarily to bury the info, sometime a delay is helpful.
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...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It also explains why a Sanders voter would willingly switch to become a Trump voter
Bernie will cave in and endorse Hillary so he is not ostracized in Congress and given no committee appointments and otherwise made irrelevant.
Bernie voters will largely be good little Democrats loyal to the party and vote for Hillary. And they wonder why they are ignored. When a voter is loyal to a party they are irrelevant, the party already has their vote and need not appease them.
Bernie voters enjoy the few symbolic lines you get in a meaningless party platform that no one ever honors, symbolic lines just like every other forgotten group got in previous party platforms.
Because Diversity!
Oh, and because they want the convention to FeelTheBern.
Or is it FeelTheBurn?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Only big business and congress
But sir, you repeat yourself.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What the !@#$ is with these BS posts on almost every thread?
According to Google Translate "It is enjoyed listening to this fucking pedophile talking to my nephew who wants to kill me because I'm not a pedophile and I have no intention of leaving my children being abused by the gang of little flower of coke ."
Spambot? Did /. just Orkut?
It's even giving me pause how deep the roots of Amazon and Facebook go in the internet, the only thing that surprises me now isn't how long ads for something I've looked at follow me, but that they don't stop after I've finally bought it.
One bizarre thing I've notice is a lot of links on Facebook to Uber-Conservative sites are redirecting to sites that my anti-virus is blocking in the last few days. I thought it was just my paranoia over some wonky adds served up on the sites, but now I'm not so sure. Seems like with all of the programming chops they have, it would be trivial to insert some malicious adverts into sites they disagree with philosophically.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yup, another confirmed Hillary voter / shill / corrupt person.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yup, another confirmed Hillary voter / shill / corrupt person.
Nope. Just a rational person. I won't be voting for Hillary or Bernie or Trump. The substance of my statement is reasonable. A company considering publishing private information that was hacked risks prosecution.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Yep, whenever it's attack the source and ignore the content, it's obvious that we have a mouth-breather talking.
A shill for the Dem, Lib. Progressives. They can not win unless the voters are uninformed and do not know the facts. That is why the teachers unions only teach lies. they need to keep the masses uninformed esp. African Americans. Ade Lincoln was a republican!! The old south slave owners pre civil war war were dems The post civil war leaders who passed the segregation laws were dems, old slave owners who wanted to control African Americans The last member of congress who was a member of the KKK was a dem. Senator Strom Thurmond Truth is freedom, From Stroms wiki page In opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, he conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop. In the 1960s, he opposed the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 to end segregation and enforce the constitutional rights of African-American citizens, including suffrage. He always insisted he had never been a racist, but was opposed to excessive federal authority. He attributed the movement to Communist agitators.[5] In 1948, Thurmond said: all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.[5] The dem party is using welfare and the lies of oppression to control what why once owned. Why any African American would be a dem is beyond me.
No, the Russians did it in response to an offensive video.
Computers are compromised all the time, and published docs on Wikileaks all the time. IF you start punishing Wikileaks now, you're just saying THIS time is too far, and all those other times ... not so much.
That is kind of the whole point of Wikileaks, and has been. So, unless this is your latest protest in a long line of protests against Wikileaks, you're just a closet shill. I would protest against Wikileaks, except this time, the far left which has been feeding off Wikileaks for years, has finally been Leaked as being exactly what I always thought they were. That, and very few on the left cared about those being hacked and released to Wikileaks before Friday, so turn about is fair play IMHO. Karma is a bitch.
And for the record, I am a Libertarian. Karma is a bitch unless you stand on principles even when they don't work in your favor. My only joy in this is that the Press cannot hide this shit from view, and we're all seeing exactly how the 5th estate has been carrying Clinton's baggage around. It is also kind of fun watching the cognitive dissonance from Hillary Supporters trying to defend the indefensible. I expect the silence from normal DNC trolls to last only a short while (next time Trump inserts foot into mouth)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I was talking about Facebook's actions and choices, not Wikileaks' actions.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's not clear that "the network effect" is sufficient to cause them to be considered a monopoly. And that's the only grounds that I see for calling them a monopoly. Facebook is more like a "public accommodation". The laws regarding that are different from those regarding monopolies, and I don't understand them, but they *do* exist.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you think your copyright has been violated, file a DMCA takedown request.
I would think that anything newsworthy would fall under fair use though. I'm pretty sure most people think that is obvious too.
It doesn't even matter. Most people complaining are Facebook users and it would be within their rights to request certain behavior from Facebook - even if it means going elsewhere.
I say they organize a protest and dislike every news story that isn't about beer or puppies to skew their metrics.
You clearly don't deal with lawyers much. They would usually advice caution.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
People are offen using FB and other services. They are so easy to use. And all your friends are there, but it is not the free Inernrt you are using. It a walked garden, protected by FB and their personal interest. They control what you see every day.
When it happens. As it stands today I fully expect the exit polls to show Trump with a double digit lead and yet somehow Hillary wins. It _just_ happened that way with Sanders, so you have to expect as much. I am actually quite amazed that the DNC is not a full out riot based on the leaked emails. The corruption was obvious enough when Hillary won 6 out of 6 coin tosses and exit polls flipped in almost every race. Now there is proof as to a more broad corruption and collusion.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
People who don't care about honesty and the free exchange of ideas false "report" sites they don't like as having malware, deceptive contents, whatever they can so that the automated filters in Google, anti-virus, etc.. prevent people from visiting them.
The practice not only (temporarily) blocks sites which shouldn't be blocked, but also gets people used to assuming a blocked site is much more likely to be a false positive and thus bypass the blocking. A great lose/lose scenario from these idiots.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Hilarious, given the fact that Hillary is a right-wing freakshow who can out-neocon and out-neoliberal her GOP opponent any day of the week.
Money.
You raise interesting points
To be fair, a dump of "19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments" almost certainly does contain some amount of malware.
not lifelong, just the past 20 years
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Because they are bunch of liberal ninnies, invested in electing sHillary at all costs. Dissemination of these emails would hinder their efforts. Why is everyone so surprised that a bunch of Bay Area socialists are protecting their own kind by all means possible ? Why is this news ? Why are you expecting equality and balance from a walled garden, where the wardens have the last word ? why-why-why ?
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Zuckerburg and his H1B visa army are to stupid to do it.