The European Commission looked into whether the tech giants were meeting a pledge to remove hate speech within 24 hours of it being reported.

"It is our duty to protect people in Europe from incitement to hatred and violence online," said Ms Jourova. "While IT Companies are moving in the right direction, the first results show that the IT companies will need to do more to make it a success."

The social media platform has suspended accounts of several high-profile users associated with the alt-right movement, CBSNews.com reported Wednesday. These include Richard Spencer, Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers.

"It is corporate Stalinism," he said in a YouTube response to this week's Twitter ban. "There is a great purging going on, and [Twitter is] purging people on the basis of their views."

The fumble comes almost a week after the US presidential election, in which Trump, the Republican nominee, pulled off a stunning upset victory. In the aftermath, commenters have argued fake news circulating on social networks helped get him elected.

"Google is an important source of news for people who tend to fall toward the middle of the ideological spectrum," Jesse Holcomb, associate director of research for the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. "It is a generally trusted source of news."

Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook will do more to tackle fake news, and again denied it had in any way aided Donald Trump's presidential election victory.

Mr Zuckerberg continued: "That said, we don't want any hoaxes on Facebook. Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news.

WikiLeaks said Assange lost connectivity on Sunday, sparking speculation Ecuador might have been pressured by the United States due to the group's publication of hacked material linked to U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

"In that respect, Ecuador, exercising its sovereign right, has temporarily restricted access to part of its communications systems in its UK Embassy," it added in a statement.

Wikileaks says that Ecuador has shut down internet access for its founder Julian Assange.

Wikileaks has recently been releasing emails from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The scripts reveal her bantering relationship with the investment bank's executives, which is unlikely to allay fears among liberal Democrats that she is too cosy with Wall Street.

According to the latest leaked emails, Mrs Clinton told a Goldman Sachs conference she would like to intervene secretly in Syria.

As we've reported previously, the Confidential Commodities List makes it possible to conceal trade data when exposing it could offer hints about a transaction that could represent commercial intelligence or distort a market.

Oh and while we're here, trade data on “Automatic data processing machines, weighing 10 kg or more and presented in the form of systems, (excl. personal computers and machines comprising in the same housing at least a central processing unit and input and output unit)” has again been crimped for September 2016.

The latest victim? Would you believe it's the European Parliament itself? Marietje Schaake, a really wonderful Member of the European Parliament (and a Techdirt reader), tweeted that the video she had posted of a European Parliament debate on "anti-torture" was taken down for "violating community guidelines." Really.

And while it's likely that with enough attention, YouTube will magically reverse its ridiculous position on this video, not everyone is able to get that kind of attention. It makes you wonder what other content is getting blocked because some algorithm, or some clueless individual, can't be bothered to understand what's happening.

For some reason, however, Paramount Pictures is not happy with seeing the popular operating system on torrent sites. In a notice sent out by the movie studio’s anti-piracy partner a few days ago, Google is asked to remove an Ubuntu torrent download page on ExtraTorrent.

Despite the obvious non-infringing status of the Ubuntu release, Google moved ahead and removed the page from its search index. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the volume of requests that the company has to process.

The image, taken by AP photographer Nick Ut, showed a young girl, naked and in agony from severe burns on her back, running in terror from a U.S. napalm attack on her village in Vietnam. That photo, and a few others from that war, changed many people's opinions about the war and may even have helped speed up the peace process.

Facebook also removed all discussion of its decision and it then blocked the people who didn't agree with its decision and had the nerve to mention it. One such person was the prime minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, who was blocked for sending a complaint to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

This move toward punishment is where Facebook shows its true colors. It is not a reliable news source, and it cannot be as long as it tries to silence those who don't conform to the standards enforced by its algorithms.