Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
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Twitter The Hillary Clinton email scandal was once again revived in the news this week, thanks to WikiLeak’s release on Wednesday of an archive of 30,322 emails pulled from a private account she used during her tenure as secretary of state. Two days later, WikiLeaks called Facebook on the carpet for allegedly censoring users’ access via the social network to WikiLeaks’ latest Clinton dispatch. If WikiLeaks’ charge is valid, the tech behemoth that Mark Zuckerberg built could effectively be aiding the Democratic presidential hopeful—and since well before Super Tuesday III, the mainstream media’s christened Democratic front-runner—in her efforts to keep those pesky emails from getting between her and the White House. Here’s a closer look at the dispute, which was fittingly touched off via social media. Below is the tweet WikiLeaks sent out on Friday accusing Facebook of censorship: Dear @Facebook: stop censoring our Hillary Clinton email release. No, really. Stop it. There is no technical excuse. pic.twitter.com/AMbIUiPkid— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 18, 2016 Gauntlet: thrown. But what does it mean? The image included below the tweet’s text suggests a sequence of events, visually summed up in a screen shot, in which a Facebook user had spotted WikiLeaks’ story about the Clinton email release and tried to get to the archive by clicking on WikiLeaks’ link as displayed on his or her Facebook news feed. Instead of taking the user to Clinton’s emails, the click produced a pop-up message containing a “security precaution” that warned, “your computer may be infected with a virus or a malicious browser extension.” So far, still cryptic. Much has been written over the years about how Facebook influences news-gathering and consumption patterns in ways that don’t exactly cultivate a politically enlightened public, and media-watchers have fretted about how Internet-addled Americans are echo-chambering and cherry-picking away their higher faculties and civil liberties while Facebook eats the world. Defenders of the technology megacorp have brandished handy disclaimers to the effect that any narrowing of users’ world views or news feeds has come about as a result of some combination of individual agency and impersonal algorithms (see: hegemony) and not deliberate actions on Facebook’s part to influence which stories, not to mention candidates, are given wide exposure on its hugely influential platform. But WikiLeaks apparently doesn’t view Facebook as operating from the de facto position when it comes to the Hillary Clinton email incident—the language of the accusation clearly points to a deliberate, active attempt to block access to the archive. Wherever the truth lies in this case, this is clearly not the first time WikiLeaks, or founder Julian Assange, has encountered static from a global superpower, and the claim is significant, considering the intense scrutiny surrounding Clinton’s emails and that they were obtained as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request. Basing the tweeted allegation on a technical glitch or a one-off user error would be the kind of rookie mistake that WikiLeaks, having spent several go-rounds at this kind of rodeo, would be ill-advised to make. We’re investigating further and will add updates as more details emerge. A request for comment from Facebook’s office was not returned by press time. Meanwhile, more than 30,000 of Clinton’s emails are now available for perusal in archived format—but they might be best accessed directly on Wikileaks’ site. —Posted by Kasia Anderson
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