In the wake of the WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables a lot of political fallout has been occurring, and no less in the world of cyberspace. Amid the first to cast out WikiLeaks was the Internet retail giant Amazon.com, who leased them cloud-storage space, then financial institutions such as Visa and Paypal discontinued their affiliation, and now these acts have made them targets for denial of service attacks.

The hacker group responsible for these attacks have set up public operational spaces on both Facebook and Twitter—and now the two companies have responded by shuttering those accounts.

Reuters brings us a detailed account of the situation, with a little bit of back story,

Facebook confirmed it had removed the activists’ Operation Payback site on Thursday because it was promoting a distributed denial of service attack — an illegal form of freezing websites. Twitter declined to comment.

The swoop against Operation Payback’s self-described campaigners for Internet freedom followed their online attacks on credit card giants like Visa and MasterCard.

The campaign reappeared on Twitter later in the European afternoon using another account. Experts said the outages were unlikely to have much effect on the pro-WikiLeaks cyber campaign as activists were using separate chatrooms to organize.

A representative of one of the groups involved in the online campaign said on Thursday that more cyber attacks in reprisal for attempts to block the WikiLeaks website were likely.

The actions of Facebook and Twitter aren’t really intended to do anything to the force behind Operation Payback; but instead distance the two companies from what they perceive as illegal actions.

If much of what the article accounts is true about the structure of the Operation Payback group, it’s not a cohesive “hacker organization” at all, but instead a synergistic banner from which the idea emerged backed by numerous individuals of varying skill and interest (most of whom aren’t even hackers.) This lack of distribution means that they can regroup anywhere, and could just recreate many more accounts on Facebook, Twitter, or any number of other Internet resources.

The activities of this collective and its mission has a real impact on financial services of both Visa and MasterCard—although minor, MasterCard did report limited interruption and Visa had a temporary outage in the United States.

We will probably not see the last of this from Operation Payback. Facebook might continue to kill accounts connected with them; but eventually it will peter out in its vigilance because this demonstration may only serve their own political purpose of not being seen as connected to their denial of service attacks and other activities. Of course, their action might also put them on the chopping block of Operation Paypack’s targets, but so far it seems that they are sated with lashing out at those who have cut-off WikiLeaks.