WikiLeaks’ Facebook account won’t be shut down

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Facebook isn’t planning to shut down WikiLeaks’ account, despite a growing backlash against the controversial document-sharing website.

Over the last few days Amazon has stopped hosting WikiLeaks, MasterCard stopped accepting payments for the site, PayPal dumped it and founder Julian Assange’s bank accounts have been frozen.

Tuesday morning, Assange turned himself into police in Britain after Swedish authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. Assange is being held without bail until a hearing next week on possible extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations he sexually assaulted two women.

But none of that is Facebook’s concern as of now.

The contents of the posts on WikiLeaks’ official Facebook page is what has determined how the social networking site is handling the issue, said Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes in an article from ReadWriteWeb, a technology blog.

‘The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies,’ Noyes told ReadWriteWeb.

More than a week ago, WikiLeaks began publishing, alongside news outlets such as the New York Times, about 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that have revealed state secrets and concerns, as well as political gossip that have increased tensions between world leaders.

[Updated 1:09 p.m.: Andrew Noyes, of Facebook, e-mailed this statement along to the Times: ‘We haven’t received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page, or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain unlawful content. If we did, of course, we would review the material according to our rules and standards, and take it down if appropriate.

‘The mere existence of a Wikileaks fan page on Facebook doesn’t violate any law and we would not take it down just like we don’t take down other pages about controversial topics. We’re continuing to monitor the situation.’]

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles