Yesterday, September 19, 2011, Yahoo apologized to users after e-mail account holders were prevented from sending messages about anti-Wall Street demonstrations over the weekend.
A Yahoo spokesman said that an external spam filter had blocked e-mail account holders messages; however, they maintained that it was inadvertent. Yahoo stated that the problem has since been resolved but there may be some residual issues.
ThinkProgress, which posted first about the problem, uploaded the following video of someone being blocked from e-mailing a message inviting their friends to visit the “Occupy Wall St.” campaign Web site.
Yahoo appears to be censoring Occupy Wall Street protest messages
After account holders typed in to the text field, a message suggesting a visit to the occupywallstreet.org Web site for more on the protests, the system returned the following message:
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.
If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
The spokeswoman for Yahoo stated that Yahoo did not purposely block the messages. She said that Yahoo initially became aware of the situation on Sunday “that some folks sending e-mail were getting the weird bounce-back” but that Yahoo has since taken steps to resolve the problem.
Stay Connected With MABIAA By Following Us On Facebook!
