Facebook, Twitter Locked in WikiLeaks War

Facebook and Twitter have found themselves stuck in the middle of a furious online battle that shows no sign of stopping any time soon. The social media sites have blocked accounts belonging to a group waging cyber-war on firms that have stopped doing business with WikiLeaks — but the move means the sites themselves could become targets of "Operation Payback," the New York Times notes.

The hacker group "Anonymous," which claims to have taken down Visa and Mastercard's websites, relied heavily on Facebook and Twitter to organize. Facebook has issued a statement saying that while it removed the Operation Payback page for promoting illegal behavior, WikiLeaks' own presence on Facebook is intact and it has had no requests to remove it. Twitter executives declined to discuss the situation.