Not to say that this is malicious, but if it was, they always make excuses like that.
"It was inadvertent, and we're working to fix the problem".
The problem is, most of the time any IT-related issue rears its ugly head, the problem is caused by incompetence and not by malice.
Given the usual bugs, don't you think that a system like this would catch enough false positives that people would notice? Unless... they're censoring such complaints as well! ;-)
I would have sided with you before the news that showed US and EU companies are building net censorship tools for governments. They have been exposed in Syria, Libya and Tunisia but how could they not sell services to democratic governments too ? Saber-rattlers have been talking about cyber-warfare for several years now. Some of the millions spent on this buzzword was probably spent on equipments that can block messages with a deniable excuse.
But one doesn't need that type of infrastructure to block an URL. Yahoo has already spent millions building an infrastructure to block emails that look like spam.
Yahoo was always blacklist happy in my experience of working on projects that send large volumes of email. This always impacted users of BT's online services too (btinternet etc) as they use Yahoo's mail servers. It was always a massive hassle to get emails through.
"It was inadvertent, and we're working to fix the problem".
The problem is, most of the time any IT-related issue rears its ugly head, the problem is caused by incompetence and not by malice.
Given the usual bugs, don't you think that a system like this would catch enough false positives that people would notice? Unless... they're censoring such complaints as well! ;-)