Facebook auto-blocked Wikileaks links, claims ‘accident’

Facebook has been accused of deliberately blocking links to Wikileaks after it revealed secretive collusion between U.S. democratic presidential hopeful, Hilary Clinton and the Democratic Party. This lead many users to accuse the social network of censorship, though Facebook has now claimed it was an accident.

Although the general election is still months away, the political race is heating up in America right now. With Donald Trump the official Republican nomination and Hilary Clinton very much the presumptive nominee for the Democrats, the email dump from Wikileaks which showed immoral and potentially criminal behaviour on Clinton's behalf is having quite a dramatic effect.

Following on from the FBI's recommendation not to indict Clinton over her lack of care in handling secretive documents, it's lead to protests at the Democratic national convention and huge outpourings of frustration from fans of Clinton's main democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, on social networks.

Understandably, many of those Sanders supporters wanted to let people know about the big email and document dump from Wikileaks, but found themselves blocked from posting links to it on both Facebook and Twitter.

@wikileaks there you go! #DNCLeaks pic.twitter.com/cfSUo4hvz0

— Adryenn Ashley (@adryenn) July 24, 2016

Wikileaks went on to encourage users to use link shorteners to get around Facebook's block, though it seems that it didn't stay in place for long. Within hours, Facebook CSO Alex Stamos publicly stated that the issue had been fixed.

When he later spoke with Wikileaks, it was explained (via RT) that it was a problem with Facebook's automated anti-spam tool, which picked up the links to documents as potentially malicious. It was described in a later tweet by Wikileaks, as an “accident.”

.@Facebook says it has unblocked the posting of links to https://t.co/nxEDEZBO1j and that the blocking was 'an accident'.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 24, 2016

There is still some scepticism with regards to these claims, but considering the issue appears to have been resolved, most people seem happy to move on.

They may not get the chance to though, as Kim Dotcom recently told the world that we should expect a lot more from Wikileaks in the future.

KitGuru Says: Have you ever run into problems with Facebook or another social network not letting you post links to content that shouldn't cause a problem?

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