Wall Street has been a mess of bodies and police for the past few days as Occupy Wall Street protests have clogged up lower Manhattan. But there were some congestion problems online too, as Yahoo was reportedly blocking emails attempting to organise the gathering.
Starting yesterday, several members of the Occupy Wall Street group reported being unable to send messages about the protests, and made the video you see above to verify that their messages were being blocked. A Yahoo rep told Gothamist, though, that the “censorship” was simply due to the occupywallst.org URL being incorrectly flagged as spam. When we tried to replicate the censorship, we were able to send and receive emails containing the keywords and the URL, so the issue seems to be resolved.
Yahoo’s still one of the largest email provider in the United States with 90 million accounts, so it would be pretty bad if they were actually blocking messages about a (conceptually) peaceful protest. But of course, it wasn’t Yahoo. It was the spam filter. Yahoo would never side with the government over peaceful dissidents. [Gothamist, Think Progress, All Things D]
Dan
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 11:59 PMThis appears to have been validated by quite a few people with yahoo.com mail accounts. I tested it with my yahoo.com.au email account and I had no problems. One would presume that the code would be the same and therefore, if it was a bug then I should have also had problems…??
Interestingly Twitter trends also excluded the #occupywallstreet hashtag, even though the rate of tweets with the tag was far greater than any of the tags in the listed trends. When people started using the modified tag #takewallstreet, it trended almost immediately. Then that disappeared. Tweeters then adopted the tag #ourwallstreet. Again it trended quickly, then (despite the tweets being genuine and the rate of tweets being higher than the ‘top trends’) it also disappeared.
A lot of people also reported that Facebook posts using #occupywallstreet also were disappearing.
I can understand that they may have been nervous after events such as the London riots, but if they were censoring emails/tweets/posts, they should have to disclose it.
scallywag
Sunday, September 25, 2011 at 8:32 AMAs much as a certain segment of society chooses to combat what they perceive to be the gaming of society by entrenched power interests perhaps we ought to ask the uncomfortable question- does anyone then really care anymore? And if they did, how is it that the movement that started off with 5000 members last weekend has dwindled to less than 200 come this weekend? After all the concerns of the ‘occupy wall street’ group are legitimate ones with deep consequences.
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2011/09/occupy-wall-st-rebel-with-a-cause-suddenly-youth-who-dont-care-about-celebrity-and-fame-but-will-this-consciousness-have-legs/