With a host of companies disabling or suspending WikiLeaks from using their services, Facebook and Twitter come into the spotlight. Will they remove the controversial site?
WikiLeaks is all over the news lately. After releasing 250,000 U.S. State Dept. cables (emails), the organization and its founder, Julian Assange, has come under assault. Though it has not been formally accused of any crime, members of the U.S. Gov’t are calling for companies to stop supporting the rogue organization. In the last week, WikiLeaks has suffered rounds of Ddos hack attacks, Amazon stopped hosting its files, EveryDNS canceled its routing service, PayPal disabled its account, Visa suspended payments to it, Mastercard is suspending payments, Assange’s Swiss bank has frozen his account, and the founder was arrested on rape charges.
With so many companies buckling to Gov’t pressure, Forbes asked Facebook if it was planning to disable WikiLeaks’ Facebook account. Spokesperson Andrew Noyes said no.
“We haven’t received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page, or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain unlawful content,” said Noyes. “If we did, of course, we would review the material according to our rules and standards, and take it down if appropriate. The mere existence of a Wikileaks fan page on Facebook doesn’t violate any law and we would not take it down just like we don’t take down other pages about controversial topics. We’re continuing to monitor the situation.”
Yesterday, Twitter was also pressured after reporters wondered by #wikileaks and #cablegate trending topics had seemingly disappeared from the site’s main page. Spokesperson Matt Graves also claims that Twitter is not disabling or censoring anything.
“Twitter is not censoring #wikileaks, #cablegate or other related terms from the Trends list of trending topics,” said Graves. “There’s a number of factors that may come into play when seemingly popular terms don’t make the Trends list. Sometimes topics that are popular don’t break into the Trends list because the current velocity of conversation (volume of Tweets at a given moment) isn’t greater than in previous hours and days. Sometimes topics that are genuinely popular simply aren’t widespread enough to make the list of top Trends. And, on occasion, topics just aren’t as popular as people believe.”
So, despite the corporate world completely caving in to Gov’t pressure, WikiLeaks still has social networks on its side…at least for now.
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