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© Dado Ruvic / Reuters
Facebook has confirmed without reason that it temporarily blocked links to the WikiLeaks files of leaked internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails. The social media giant came under fire from followers, with WikiLeaks accusing it of "censorship."

A number of people encountered problems when they tried to post links to the WikiLeaks files - which exposed the DNC's bias against Bernie Sanders - on Facebook on Saturday. Error messages said the links had been "detected to be unsafe" by Facebook's security system, and asked users "to remove links to continue."

After Twitter user @SwiftOnSecurity tweeted that "Facebook has an automated system for detecting spam/malicious links, that sometimes have false positives," Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos replied by saying "it's been fixed."

In a statement to Gizmodo, the company's representative said: "Like other services, our anti-spam systems briefly flagged links to these documents as unsafe," adding that Facebook "quickly corrected this error on Saturday evening."


Comment: Translation: Once it became apparent that the blowback for blocking the sharing of the data was going to be more of a PR nightmare than they anticipated, Facebook changed course and then pretended it was all due to "computer error." Face it, Facebook is just as much in bed with the government in spreading propaganda as any mainstream news media. The question is, how much other news gets censored by Facebook that isn't big enough to cause a disturbance and force them to change course?


Facebook sparked an uproar earlier this month, when it removed a live video showing the aftermath of the fatal shooting of African-American man Philando Castile, who was killed by a Minnesota police officer. The company later said the footage was removed due to a "technical glitch."

In early July, Facebook also admitted to removing a meme featuring former Stanford University student Brock Turner, who received a six-month jail term for sexually assaulting an unconscious young woman last January. A Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo that it was removed "in error," adding that the company's team "processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong."

Last year, Facebook removed a post from a British student which criticized the world for not responding to recent terror attacks in Lebanon and Africa with the same overwhelming support that Paris received following the deadly November attacks. The tech giant republished it, citing human error, after being approached by RT.