Facebook Admits Blocking WikiLeaks' DNC Email Links, But Won't Say Why (thenextweb.com) 270
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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To add to the horror of their Turkey leak: the information about female voters doesn't just include their names, addresses, phone numbers, and equivalents of social security numbers. It also includes whether they are members or not of Erdogan's AKP party. At a time when the country is in the middle of a bloody post-coup purge.
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The articles are mainly just screenshots of Wikileaks tweets. Do you have any substance to add to the issue, or is "the website that posted screenshots" all that you have?
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As an example: here's the raw "it wasn't an error" [twitter.com] tweet from Wikileaks confirming that they doxxed on purpose.
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Wow, dailykos and Huffpo really shilling for the DNC, huh? The number of hit pieces is pretty hilarious and transparent.
Where have you been? Under a rock? Those orgs started out biased and have never been anything else.
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That isn't remotely anti-semitic, it's wikileaks having no clue what that means and noticing that it's become another substanceless way to virtue-signal among social justice circles. The idea that it's anti-semitic is a pathetically transparent smear campaign by the regressive left against an organization that opposes everything they stand for.
If you want to see REAL anti-semitism just look at the regressive left's support for openly genocidal terrorist organizations, and groups which attack and harass jewi
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it's wikileaks having no clue what that means and noticing that it's become another substanceless way to virtue-signal among social justice circles.... a pathetically transparent smear campaign by the regressive left...
Thank you for demonstrating exactly what I was just talking about. The parentheses WERE anti-semitic, then people started using them on their own in protest, then it became nothing more than another way to virtue signal among regressive social justice warriors who are ironically enough one of the biggest sources of anti-semitism today.
Wikileaks came along well after that point and noticed that most of the shittiest people they were dealing with had parentheses on their names and problem glasses.
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Can you name him? If you can't, then probably not.
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Peter Thiel. Kind of like a Silicon Valley Unicorn. He might be the only big shot there to support Trump. Some people love to be hated.
Same as with all other Democrat institutions (Score:2, Troll)
The illegal / immoral / ethically questionable activity will continue until someone catches it.
Re: Same as with all other Democrat institutions (Score:2)
Yes we did.
Re:Same as with all other Democrat institutions (Score:5, Insightful)
When did Republicans do it? For that matter when did Facebook or Twitter, remove information that made Republicans look bad?
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What do you think they just did? The only way the GOP could out-neocon Hillary would be to nominate Kissinger, and the only way they could out-corrupt her would be to nominate Madoff.
Re: Same as with all other Democrat institutions (Score:2)
Lol. Is that so?
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I like that, Republicans are elitists and rednecks. That's a perfect blend. It looks like the rednecks finally took the party away from the elitists this year. They picked a rich Yankee Redneck. It's so fucking hilarious. This is the best election ever if you enjoy chaos and confusion. If we don't get a viable third party candidate this year you know it'll never happen again in a century or more. I figure 40 percent of the people will vote for Hilliary because she's the Democratic nominee. 40 percen
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And then it just continues in plain sight?
Yes, actually, it does. You've seen multiple examples of this surrounding Hillary Clinton and her operatives in the DNC in the last days and weeks. With Clinton, you've seen it for years. Are you actually surprised?
Because money (Score:5, Insightful)
Clinton is the corporate candidate this cycle. Why would corporations want to harm the candidate that's fighting for them?
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As an aside, this may be the first election where corporations donate more money to the Democrats than to the Republicans.
That's outside of the money they've already "donated" to the Clintons.
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Bullshit, that will never happen. You do realize that Unions are corporations?
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Not necessarily. They can be, but many unions especially the smaller ones still operate as not-for-profits. Larger ones like Teamsters, Unifor, Pipefitters, etc., you bet.
Re: Because money (Score:2)
Yes. Not for profit. Not for profit what?
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Yes. Not for profit. Not for profit what?
This is my main problem with people who complain about the Citizens United decision--none of them ever seem to stop to think about what a "corporation" is, they just yell "four legs good, two legs bad" and talk about "corporate personhood," ignoring the real problems with the idea that people acting in concert (i.e. "corporate entities") should not have the same rights as people acting independently.
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Clinton is the corporate candidate this cycle. Why would corporations want to harm the candidate that's fighting for them?
So your theory is that FB understands nothing about social networks and has never heard of the Streisand Effect.
The link was blocked for a short period and then unblocked, this is perfectly consistent with an anti-spam system, that's a narrative that makes sense.
Simply blocking the link to suppress the news, that's not a narrative that makes sense. It draws attention to the censorship which looks bad on FB and throws more attention on the docs themselves.
Sometime a delay is helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
And you think obvious censorship is how they would choose to do it?
If FB wanted to suppress the news they'd just suppress it in the news feeds, essentially what they were accused of doing with some conservative stories.
It wouldn't be blocked or obviously censored, it just wouldn't show up in news feeds as often as it should, it would be very effective and really hard to detect.
Obvious censoring with a crude block makes no sense.
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It's not censorship when the Dems do it.
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You know, if I was black I bet I'd hate your honkey ass too.
Re:Because money (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, they think that a temporary block provides enough of a pause to stop things from going full viral before a response can be issued. Viral transfer of information can't continue if the links don't work. While the Streisand Effect is bad, viral transfer is WORSE, because it is associated with real people (your friends / family) and you are more likely to re-post the information. The Streisand Effect may make people generally aware that someone has done something bad but specific links from your friends / family's facebook pages have a much higher impact than reading about it on slashdot the next day when after denial and false narratives have been spun.
The entire Clinton playbook is based on denying the truth, spinning an alternate/false narrative, misdirecting attention to something else and trying to move on. The formula has worked incredibly well because blind supporters a) believe the denial, b) can use the false narrative in conversation and c) the topic passes before supporters run out of stamina on defending the topic.
Blocking the viral spread allows time to deny and generate the false narratives, before the Streisand Effect can take hold. Plus, Facebook has the ultimate excuse they use EVERY TIME - "spam filter" or "careless employee" or "automatic script" etc. What facebook using Hillary lover is not going to believe the story?
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So your theory is that FB understands nothing about social networks and has never heard of the Streisand Effect.
And I'd say the current story is supporting evidence for the claim that FB just might not understand social networks as much as it should.
Re:Because money (Score:4, Insightful)
Clinton is the corporate candidate this cycle.
That's the most concise explanation of why Trump will win that I've seen yet. It also explains why a Sanders voter would willingly switch to become a Trump voter, even though they are different in many ways.
Sanders voters will be good little Democrats (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Bernie will cave in and endorse Hillary so he is not ostracized
He did: check it out [youtu.be]. He got booed for nearly 30 seconds. Of course, these are hardcore fans who went all the way to Philadelphia, so may not be representative.
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They also make up nearly 40% of the delegates. They aren't just a few hardcore fans.
Re:Sanders voters will be good little Democrats (Score:5, Interesting)
Bernie told the BernieBots today that they need to vote for Hillary. He got booed by his audience. They really don't like Hillary, though I can't see them voting Trump.
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Trump isn't going to win. Sanders voters will bitch and moan and then vote for Hilliary. Maybe as many as 10 percent will either vote for Trump or more likely just stay home. Hilliary was always going to be the Democratic nominee. It was decided well before the primary ever kicked off. Sanders wasted a lot of time and money and he never had a chance. The entire party machine was out to get him from the start. The Republicans fucked up and let Trump get on a roll and then the fact they had a field of
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Trump isn't going to win.
Why not? He's getting ahead in the polls.
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Because 95 percent of the media is going to actively campaign for Hilliary. All the corporations that usually donate to Republican candidates are going to donate to Hilliary. Every talk show is going to pillory him. Thousands of Hollyweird stars are going to bad mouth him constantly. The Republican elite are at best going to give only the most lukewarm support they think they can get away with. All that and he'll probably still manage to get within 3-5 percent of Hilliary but it wont be enough.
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I own property in a very heavy democrat leaning area in Florida(Hillsborough and Polk Counties), I was just down there doing some prep work for the storm season and to leave keys with one of my friends down there in case they need to board up the house. Everywhere I went those democrats that I know, the areas that were democrats it's Trump. Even the die hard supporters after finding out about the leaks have swung Trump. They believe that neither the DNC or Clinton have their interests at heart and believ
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Well, yes, because when the choice is between a technocrat and a lying, cheating, insane weasel, that's a no-brainer.
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Trump isn't going to win.
I don't know about that. Recently the elite everywhere have been getting their asses handed to them by the voters regardless of whether or not the voters are voting for/against their own self-interest. Exhibit A: Brexit.
I'll believe it (Score:2)
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Re:Because money (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they have terrible critical thinking skills and fall for dumb conspiracy theories?
I don't know about their critical thinking, but there was a real conspiracy here, the evidence is right there on Wikileaks......
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You seem to think that the "dumb conspiracy theories" comment was flippant. It wasn't. It is part n parcel of the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" claim by Clintonistas. Everything they don't like is a "conspiracy" so it is dismissed. Even when it turns out to be true. This isn't the first time it has been tossed around, and I doubt it will be the last ...
Oh hey look, https://newrepublic.com/minute... [newrepublic.com]
The Clinton Playbook page 105
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That was obvious all along, and perfectly fine as long as they weren't favouring a candidate in their duties.
Clearly you haven't heard of the superdelegates going to Clinton before a single vote was cast.
Re:Because money (Score:5, Insightful)
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How can you not consider superdelegates to be corruption? What exactly do you consider to be corruption?
Superdelegates accepting payments or other secret favours for their votes? Corruption.
Superdelegates following the rules as laid out by the party. Not corruption.
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Re:Because money (Score:5, Insightful)
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The "smoking gun" that you've mentioned is sufficient to see a number of things in a new light. For example, the debate schedule. It was long claimed by Sanders supporters that it was intentional to undermine him, but before the DNC email leak, the party could always (rightly) say "prove it". Now that the leaks have demonstrated general bias, as well as specific desire of at least some of the members to actually translate that to actions, the reasonable default assumption, on the balance of probabilities, i
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but since you guys own hypocrisy like it's no one's business, you quickly grab that flag and hoist it high because it suits your purposes.
Hypocrisy is only an issue with people I don't agree with.
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Are you kidding me? Clinton is getting money from tons of "Republicans". I use the term loosely because they are only really affiliated with the party that gives them favors. The consensus is you can't trust Trump to give you favors because... he doesn't NEED YOU the way the Clinton's need donors. It is almost somewhat ironic that one of the Clinton's assets is that they rely on a stream of donations to make a living. Its like a symbiotic relationship - everyone knows the Clinton's will follow through wi
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Trump has never had problems making money. He filed bankruptcy several times and each time he came back bigger than before. He has self funded his campaign for the most part until recently when he finally started taking donations but he's still putting a lot of his own money in. I'm not sure what motivates Trump but I suspect it's just a desire to see what he can do. He'd like to win just to say he won. It's the kind of arrogant shit he's always doing. I can't even speculate on what a Trump presidency
The party line (Score:2, Informative)
Just like they were censoring conservative news stories.
http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006
No accident...the party line.
The fix is in (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [gallup.com]
Wake up sheeple.
Redundancy (Score:3)
Only big business and congress
But sir, you repeat yourself.
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It was already clear at the time of the Democrat candidate debates that the "fix was in". Anyone who didn't realize it was just not paying attention. It was (and is) less clear that the Democrats have done more to "fix" the election than have the Republicans, though they have both been clearly seen to be doing it.
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The GOP's presumptive heir-apparent this year was Jeb Bush. Whoops.
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Bernie supporters got swindled out of 220+ million dollars to see Bernie be a shill for Hillary.
So if someone named Bernie "made off" with your money, should you be
A. mad at Bernie,
B. mad at yourself for letting yourself getting swindled,
C. mad at the system, OR
D. all of the above
Just curious...
Re: The fix is in (Score:5, Funny)
Bernie supporters got swindled out of 220+ million dollars to see Bernie be a shill for Hillary.
So if someone named Bernie "made off" with your money, should you be A. mad at Bernie, B. mad at yourself for letting yourself getting swindled, C. mad at the system, OR D. all of the above Just curious...
or E. mad at the Russians (This choice was paid for by the Clinton Campaign)
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Bernie supporters got swindled out of 220+ million dollars to see Bernie be a shill for Hillary.
So if someone named Bernie "made off" with your money, should you be
A. mad at Bernie,
B. mad at yourself for letting yourself getting swindled,
C. mad at the system, OR
D. all of the above
Just curious...
or
E. mad at the Russians (This choice was paid for by the Clinton Campaign)
Interesting theory. So Clinton must have paid a pretty penny to Putin for some compromising pictures of Bernie to convince him fold like a cheap suit...
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I might take
F. Sue the DNC and democratic party for misrepresenting a product that caused me to be swindled out of money under false pretenses.
I don't see how consumer protection laws shouldn't fall in line here. And that would be independent of D.
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Sanders stated up front that he would endorse the nominee. The party was the one doing the swindling. He kept his word even tho the situation sucks hard.
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You raise interesting points
The truth (Score:5, Insightful)
"our anti-spam systems briefly flagged links to these documents as unsafe."
The truth has a long tradition of being considered dangerous.
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Not if you are wearing a condom or have macros disabled like most safe people do.
Remember, safe sex is a crash helmet and a seat belt. Safe computing isn't much harder.
They like the DNC PRO H1B stance (Score:2)
They like the DNC PRO H1B stance
Probably trying to keep people from the malware... (Score:2)
Just sayin'
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To be fair, a dump of "19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments" almost certainly does contain some amount of malware.
Yeah I'll tell you why! (Score:2)
Because Diversity!
Oh, and because they want the convention to FeelTheBern.
Or is it FeelTheBurn?
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Because Diversity!
is that a reference to the "taco bowl" racism email?
The free and open Internet (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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Sure they can. And we can point and say "look at the Clinton shills." What's your point?
Re:Ok, so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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Yup, another confirmed Hillary voter / shill / corrupt person.
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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.
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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 L
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I was talking about Facebook's actions and choices, not Wikileaks' actions.
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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.
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Yep, whenever it's attack the source and ignore the content, it's obvious that we have a mouth-breather talking.
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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.
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You clearly don't deal with lawyers much. They would usually advice caution.
Welcome to Libertarianism (Score:4, Informative)
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 [washingtonexaminer.com]... Even texting in support of a candidate may be illegal [washingtonexaminer.com].
Unless, obviously, the candidate is from the Party of Government [synonym.com]. For a few decades we had something called Fairness Doctrine [wikipedia.org], 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 [washingtonpost.com], the game is played with only one set of goal-posts...
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Welcome to insanity.
When a given company represents 90% of the daily information stream of your average citizen, it is a monopoly. Any attempt to challenge that will have to run against an extremely high barrier to entry established by said monopoly. It doesn't mean that it can't be unseated - but doing so requires immense resources, and even then would take many years.
In the meantime, we need a way to ensure that citizens actually get all information that is relevant to their vote, rather than the one that
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That may be relevant, if it were to try to use that monopoly status to get into a different market. Facebook is not doing that, so let them be. The barrier to entry into their market is none-existent — various snapchats, instagrams, et al. have done that. Facebook itself unseated MySpace in front of our eyes.
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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.
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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.
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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.