Content Censoring

In regards to this thread: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Springer made his peace with the following:

It's already been pointed out but I guess it's worth saying again. ATS doesn't allow links to sites that obtain content illegally nor do we allow links to porno, known phishing or malware sites... That's all there is to it. Springer... ETA: OUR OFFICIAL POSITION The ATS staff has completed a long discussion regarding removing the block on links to WikiLeaks, which included reaching out to our hosting provider. The primary reason we disallowed links previously (and often the driving-force for many of our policies) is that such links to the types of materials hosted on WikiLeaks would be a technical violation of our Acceptable Use Policy with our provider. And to further make this issue more sensitive with our provider, they took heat a few years back for hosting WikiLeaks mirrors. Lots of "conspiracy sites" can overcome such restrictions because their providers are either less stringent, or have no such restrictions at all. Given the scale of our traffic, and the need for high-end hardware and network, pretty much every hosting provider capable of providing what we need will have similar (or identical) restrictions. It's the unfortunate conundrum in which ATS lives... moving to another host isn't an option. Our policy remains the same, unfortunately. But back when this first became an issue, we urged members to find other sites, sources, blogs, etc. that covered the WikiLeaks material they wanted to include in their post -- then link to those sites, with an explanation of where to find the links once there. That remains the best course of action for now

If we were to base our conclusion on what Springer has said, and considering that the V-A-S-T majority of any/most major news source mentioned in most posts on ATS are from companies that have been CHARGED with illegal spying, information gathering, ect, what is the issue?

Is it that wikileaks is the main source of information, where-as the NY Times is a 3rd party source reporting on an illegally obtained document (ie Trumps tax return), in-which, there are still plenty of ATS posts in regards to that topic still up...

Just asking for clarification on the rules. Can "illegally obtained" please be elaborated on?

ETA: In Springers ETA, I personally concluded it was more of a "we would suffer too many political problems via our providers for linking to wikileaks on our site". I could be reading into this wrong though, so sorry ahead of time. But I only firmly draw this conclusion because at the end of Springers 'eta', he mentions how we can 'work around' this by posting on another blog-site, and redirecting the information there and how to navigate to wikileaks once on the blog-site.

a reply to: JimmyNeutr0n

Illegally Obtained = Sources which the advertisers and Google would defund the site if said sources were permitted to be used. It's really as simple as that... we live in a world where those who push too hard against the official narratives get their card punched and get de-advertised and/or deplatformed.