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Yahoo Accused Of Censoring Occupy Wall Street Emails
By
John Del Signore
Published Sep 20, 2011
Modified Sep 20, 2011
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By
John Del Signore
Published Sep 20, 2011
Modified Sep 20, 2011
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Is Yahoo blocking emails with links to the Occupy Wall Street website? The short answer is yes, sometimes. We were able to send emails through our ancient, all-but-forgotten Yahoo accounts (it's been a while, [email protected]!) but check out this video, which shows someone trying and failing to send an email with the www.occupywallstreet.org url in the body. After clicking send, the user is told: "Your message was not sent. Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent." Instead, check out this teaser for tonight's new episode of "Raising Hope"!
On Twitter, Adbusters directly accused Yahoo of "censoring" emails, and Think Progress reports that "we too were prevented from sending messages about the 'Occupy Wall Street' demonstrations." So if this is happening, the question is why? Is Yahoo, helps the Chinese government track dissidents, futilely trying to stop these protesters from bringing the whole capitalist MACHINE to its knees?
No, how silly of you to think that, you paranoid loony lefty. A Yahoo spokesperson tells us, "There’s a simple explanation for this. We learned about this yesterday and our team quickly resolved it. Unfortunately, the domain 'occupywallst.org' was being caught by one of our spam filters when some users tried to send messages containing it. This was a false positive which we corrected yesterday. However, there may still be residual delay (up to 24 hours) for users trying to send emails with that phrase. Thank you to the Yahoo! Mail users who notified us about this."
Well, that's that! No conspiracy to see here! As it happens, the revolution will not be televised, it'll just be treated like a discount Viagra email.
Tagged
censorship
occupy wall street
yahoo
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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