No, Facebook wasn't deliberately censoring Wikileaks' #DNCLeak emails

Julian Assange promised to deliver a cache of emails that would harm 'liberal war hawk' Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign. Living up to Assange's promise, Wikileaks delivered the goods.

It wasn't long before controversy struck, but this was not because of the content of the emails. The communication between US Democratic Party committee members was shared on Facebook but it didn't take long for the content to be blocked, leading to accusations of censorship.

Facebook has now explained that it was not purposefully censoring Wikileaks' content. The company's chief security officer said a couple of days ago that the emails could not be accessed on the social network, but offered no explanation about why this was. But now we know.

Speaking to the BBC, a Facebook spokesperson said: "Anti-spam systems briefly flagged links to these documents as unsafe".

So the official line from Facebook is that overly aggressive, automated spam-filters were to blame rather than manual censorship.

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