US News

Facebook admits to blocking Wikileaks links in DNC email hack

Facebook admitted Sunday that it had blocked links to the Wikileaks trove of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.

In a Twitter post late Saturday, WikiLeaks accused the social media giant of “censorship” and gave its followers an online workaround, saying “try using https://archive.is.

The WikiLeaks allegation followed a firestorm of controversy that erupted earlier this year when former Facebook workers admitted routinely suppressing conservative news.

In response to the WikiLeaks charge, another Twitter user, @SwiftOnSecurity, chimed in that “Facebook has an automated system for detecting spam/malicious links, that sometimes have false positives,” which prompted a response from the company’s chief security officer.

“It’s been fixed,” Facebook CSO Alex Stamos tweeted.

Facebook didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

This is how Facebook might have abused its power to control the news in the past: