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Facebook Reportedly Blocked WikiLeaks Links To DNC E-Mails

By Nick Younker
Published on: 11:38 PST, Jul 25, 2016

Facebook is back in hot political water again, this time for reportedly blocking links on its gigantic social media platform from people who were sharing WikiLeaks reports on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). This is something that has been a sticking issue with conservatives across the country, as well as with the primary victims of the scandal, which were Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

It appears as though Facebook is back to blaming their algorithm for this mistake again, which defied earlier reports that their trending news and blocks were performed by curators for the social media platform that is now the biggest in the U.S. and the world.

For those who might be unaware, WikiLeaks is the online website that shares damaging leaked documents from American government officials and major U.S. political party associates. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been in exile ever since the leak of major U.S. cables several years ago has put him in the hot seat with American authorities.

But that has done nothing to dissuade Assange from taking on the U.S. government and major party officials, as seen over the weekend when his WikiLeaks online platform published hacked e-mails from major DNC officials that showed they plotted against Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primary election cycle.

It appears as though Facebook is not too happy with WikiLeaks anymore than the DNC is. Facebook blocked links that were shared on its giant social media platform and would not give its users access to WikiLeaks through their site, as reported by New York Post.

This is not the first time that Facebook has been in hot water in regard to trending news and topics that are largely political. Although this is the first time they have blocked WikiLeaks, they have never done so in the past when the leaked cables served to benefit the interest of the DNC. It has always seemed to be when political news was to benefit the conservative base, which got them in hot water earlier this year.

Back in May, Facebook came under fire for reportedly suppressing news that was about the GOP or anything that was considered to have a conservative bias attached to it. But this was only in particular to the trending news and topics area, not with actual blocks of their links.

In this particular instance, this will mark the first real controversy that Facebook stands accused of for blocking actual content that is political in nature. The WikiLeaks release of DNC e-mails was not just considered to be political in nature, but rather more of a whistleblower situation and people on Facebook were not able to click through to links that were posted on Facebook and their gigantic social media network that is worldwide.

The NY Post reports that Facebook has owned up to this controversy and said that it was their algorithms that search for SPAM that automatically blocked the WikiLeaks links on their social media platform. Facebook has gone as far as to say that their algorithms are in place to protect people from SPAM or malicious coding in website links that could be harmful to their users’ browsers and personal computers.

Here is where that line kind of dissolves. The Facebook algorithm also ties into people who report certain links, which could include people who did not want the WikiLeaks links to make any waves on social media. So they could have been reporting such links anonymously to Facebook, who in turn disabled the links after so many reports. These kinds of things happen automatically and Facebook has said that they quickly remedied the problem.

[Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

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