Correction: EasyDNS has done nothing of the sort, and I stand corrected on this point. For more details see their blog or Techdirt. In fact they have been added to the new DNS delegation for Wikileaks.ch and are in this case on the side of the angels.
Original post: Not only is Wikileaks a media entity: given its current trajectory, it is on track to very shortly become the most "liked" source of investigative journalism in the world.
At more than 913,000 "likes" at time of writing, and with its phenomenal rise* from nowhere to one of the most popular pages on the social graph, Wikileaks should now touch a million likes before the New York Times (hovering around 980k) does, putting it in global first place for serious investigative journalism "liked" by Facebook users voting with their clicks. Amongst comparably serious journalism practitioners the Guardian's main Facebook page sits at 54k likes, BBC News at 51k, HuffPo at 171k. Only crypto-serious news satire like the Onion, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are ahead with likes in the 1.5m to 2m range (nothing to sneeze at, since satirical news audiences are the best informed in America); the biggest media channel of any sort by likes is Disney at 14.5m, assuming we exclude Facebook's own almost 30m.
Yesterday it looked (a lot) like Twitter was censoring Wikileaks from trending - see this excellent research for details, though Twitter has a semi-plausible, Googley "our algorithim is really quite complicated" explanation for why it's all above board. (Google itself has refused to respond to enquiries from The Atlantic as to whether it would take down Wikileaks cables if they were published on Blogger.)
But even if Twitter doesn't want to show, or for complex and thoroughly counter-intuitive reasons uses an algorithm that doesn't show, the fastest-rising social media trend of the last fortnight, Facebook's likes show the trend unambiguously.
In similar vein social micropayments site Flattr is making a point of keeping open its Wikileaks donations page, and the money still has plenty of places to go even after Paypal and one Swiss bank pulled the plug. (It'll be especially interesting to see what can be done to pressure an Icelandic bank given the circumstances of the Icelandic banking system.) Not everyone has bottled it in the face of US pressure, overt or implied; at current trajectory Wikileaks will have one million likes in the next 24 hours; even if it doesn't fit Twitter's algoithmic criteria for "trending" it has been the most popular term on the site for days; the mirrors are now north of 500; and more than 650 people (self included) have signed up to offer Julian Assange a place to crash if he gets into a tight corner.
Rig it, hide it or threaten it all you like, Wikileaks is winning the popular vote wherever you look. Of the Internet, for the Internet and by the Internet the Internet is voting for it everwhere.
*taken from a dynamic page at InsideFacebook which will quite quickly cease to reflect this point
EasyDNS is innocent of unplugging wikileaks:
http://blog.easydns.org/2010/12/04/thank-you-to-all-i-would-like-this-to-stop-now/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101204/16354312130/mistakes-were-made-how-tons-people-started-slamming-easydns-actions-everydns.shtml
In fact EasyDNS is doing the opposite, they've been added to the DNS delegation for Wikileaks.ch
So, it'd be nice if you changed the post :-)
Posted by: Baldur Bjarnason | 07 December 2010 at 12:01
Baldur - agreed. Am typing from a phone so can comment but not easily amend, but will make it a priority when properly online again.
Posted by: seamus mccauley | 07 December 2010 at 13:12