Yahoo Appears To Be Censoring Email Messages About Wall Street Protests

[Ian David]

Source: Think Progress

Thinking about e-mailing your friends and neighbors about the protests against Wall Street happening right now? If you have a Yahoo e-mail account, think again. ThinkProgress has reviewed claims that Yahoo is censoring e-mails relating to the protest and found that after several attempts on multiple accounts, we too were prevented from sending messages about the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations.

Over the weekend, thousands gathered for a “Tahrir Square”-style protest of Wall Street’s domination of American politics. The protesters, organized online and by organizations like Adbusters, have called their effort “Occupy Wall Street” and have set up the website: www.OccupyWallSt.org. However, several YouTube users posted videos of themselves trying to email a message inviting their friends to visit the Occupy Wall St campaign website, only to be blocked repeatedly by Yahoo. View a video of ThinkProgress making the attempt with the same blocked message experienced by others (click full screen for a better view of the text):

<snip>

It’s not the first time Yahoo has been accused of political censorship. Yahoo officially partners with the repressive Chinese regime to provide the government with access to emails related to groups viewed as dissidents. An explosive investigation by Der Spiegel found that Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with access to emails from journalists, and the snooping resulted in the same journalists being sent to prison camps.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have continued, but if you own a Yahoo e-mail account, you might not know about it.

More:
http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/09/20/323856/yahoo-censoring-occupy-wall-street-protests/



Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/09/20/323856/yahoo-censoring-occupy-wall-street-protests/

[sellitman]

1. I wonder who is behind this?

Holder? Obama? The ghost of Carl Rove?

[arcane1]

2. For what it's worth, I was able to email the link with no problem n/t

[BonnieJW]

5. Me too

I sent out two emails on this subject with links and there was no problem.

[Xithras]

3. Nope, this isn't censorship.

It's Yahoo's anti-spam system. As an AT&T user, all of my primary accounts webmail has been subcontracted through Yahoo, and I've run into this before myself when sending work-related emails.

Yahoo doesn't merely score the individual emails within your account, but they compare YOUR email with OTHER PEOPLES emails. If their system sees multiple users sending emails to a large number of people with links to an external site, it assumes that the message is spam and arbitrarily blocks ALL USERS from sending any emails that use the spam-flagged terms or have links to sites that have been designated spam. Yahoo users can also mark messages as spam when they're received. If you send an email to 10 people, and three of them flag your message as spam, Yahoo will automatically block your account and build a new realtime filter profile based on your message...even if it WAS NOT spam. There is no free recourse for users once their accounts are designated as spammers.

There is, of course, a paid way around it. Yahoo has a program that allows you to pay them in exchange for being removed from their filters. They are more aggressive with their anti-spam filtering because it's one of their profit centers.

Yahoo sucks. I wouldn't use them at all of AT&T didn't force them on me.

[pnorman]

8. That's correct. The message won't be blocked,

but SpamGuard will put it in the Spam folder. You can then declare it "NOT SPAM", and it will then be in the "IN" box.

[Xithras]

10. Sometimes it IS outright blocked.

I used to regularly send a large number of messages to my clients via Yahoo, and they would often simply block them outright. Incoming email from external hosts gets routed by SpamGuard, but email actually generated on Yahoo can be blocked at the time of transmission, so it never even makes it that far. There's often very little rhyme or reason from the users perspective. I once had an outbound message spam-flagged and blocked without explanation, so I started reworking the message to get it around their filters. In the end, placing a PERIOD on the end of the message title allowed it to go through. Yeah, it was stupid.

If you watch the video at the OP link, you can see the message the creator types in. That's exactly the kind of message that Yahoo would be flagging for spam. Single sentence, all one case, with a link to an external website. It has spam written all over it.

FWIW, I just stopped sending anything via Yahoo. While I still have to use it because it's attached to my DSL account, most of my personal email is now handled via GMail.

[formercia]

4. I copied your post and set it to another of my Yahoo accounts

here is the message I got when I tried to send it:

"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."

[totodeinhere]

7. I just tried it and it went right through. Perhaps they got complaints about this and stopped

doing it. I don't know.

[Speck Tater]

6. I have an extra Yahoo account I use to avoid spam. I tried emailing to one of my real accounts

and it worked just fine. Sounds more like a spam filter problem to me. (But I must admit, it IS a lot more fun to rant and rave about corporate conspiracies than to seek the truth.)

[totodeinhere]

9. I don't blame anyone for being paranoid and assuming it's a conspiracy.

It probably isn't in this case but we do know that things like this can happen.

[aquart]

12. I sent the link to my Yahoo group. I'll see if they get it.

We don't need hysteria, we need facts.

[SpiralHawk]

11. Screw Yahoo (R)

on general principle

[aggiesal]

13. What gives these Yahoo's ...

the right to do this?

What's their justification?

I can't believe they're allowed to filter anything they don't like.
I can see if it's racist, pornographic or the like, but everyday news
should never be filtered.

[boppers]

22. One by one:

"What gives these Yahoo's the right to do this?"

It's going through their network, their servers. They can filter or block anything they want to when it's on their network, on their servers.

"What's their justification?"

It looked like a massive spam attack.

"I can't believe they're allowed to filter anything they don't like."

You are not allowed to use my hard drives for anything you want, I am not allowed to use your hard drives for anything I want, and neither of us are allowed to use Yahoo's hard drives for anything we want.

"I can see if it's racist, pornographic or the like, but everyday news should never be filtered."

Spammers already tried this argument. It was found lacking.

[madrchsod]

14. why would anyone use yahoo?

most of the sites my wife uses for her union and other secure sites will not recognize yahoo as a valid address.

google mail seems to be the choice of 95% of the sites she uses.

[Ian David]

16. It's a good disposable address for subscribing to porn sites. n/t

[20score]

15. I really don't care what a stranger had for breakfast. Passing this story around is what FB is for.

[BadGimp]

17. This one more reason I won't shed a tear as Yahoo implodes

for me it started several years ago when they eliminated their Comments from all news stories. They gave some bullshit reason but it was due no doubt to pressure they got because too damn many Libruls were talking about stuff and saying things and bringing up facts and stuff.

[L. Coyote]

18. I tried and I am NOT censored.

"Occupy Wall Street website: www.OccupyWallSt.org "

This went right thru!

I do get the other prompt "Message not sent" sometimes when I report SPAM because it involves sending to suspicious IP addresses!

[L. Coyote]

19. UnREC for BS

[boppers]

20. Spamming is bad, mmkay?

They weren't being "censored" over politics, they were being "censored" for bulk mailing a URL, which tripped off the spam filters.

Of course, the simple technical explanation is never assumed. :(

[MADem]

26. Yep, if they had sent along something advertising penis enlargement,

college without classes, or even a recipe for potato pancakes to a shitload of folks, they would have had the same issues....

[jtrockville]

21. Yahoo resolved the problem.

http://100gf.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/yahoo-mail-fixes-occupy-wall-street-block-says-automatic-spam-filters-to-blame/

[No Elephants]

23. Riiight.

[Demeter]

24. I sent from Yahoo to Hotmail just now

Took the whole post and put all the key words in the title...

[Uncle Joe]

25. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Ian David.