Group Responsible for Censoring Digg Stories Exposed

Digg, the popular social news site, has long been appreciated and loathed by many. For regular users, it’s a great source of the latest news, singled out by fellow users. For others, such as site owners, it’s a frustrating service, as getting anything of value to the front-page is near impossible unless you have a brigade of friends to help you out.

The reason for that boils down to Digg’s design. When a story is submitted, it requires immediate “diggs” (votes) from users in order to progress up the chain and remain noticeable to others. If your story doesn’t receive enough diggs in a certain amount of time, it will never make it to the front page. Digg’s most active users – those who regularly get their story to the front page – also have a greater weight in the voting system than others, so if they vote, their entire friends list can see that, and the story has a good chance of making it to the front page.

Many websites out there take advantage of these “brigades”, but very rarely does any specific information come out of them. Generally, they are small and simple groups, but with active members who digg a story on a whim, without even looking at it. Today, though, a blog at AlterNet exposes one such brigade, called “Digg Patriots”. This is a group of conservatives who’ve teamed up in order to make sure that news stories their group disagrees with never makes it to the front page.

According to this article, about 90% of the stories this brigade “buried” never made it to the front page, so you could certainly say it was successful. And of course, this kind of behavior does raise some serious concerns, because it’s clear that if you simply get a large group of people together, you can pretty-well control what hits the front page. Or in easier-to-understand terms, “censor” what other people are going to see.

Conservative or not, going to such measures to censor anything generally tells the rest of the world that what you believe in is likely rubbish, because if it wasn’t, there would be no need to censor it. Truths come out eventually, and censoring only makes YOU look all the more guilty. And regardless of it all, a social news site such as Digg certainly should be doing something more in order to stop the user-powered censoring, because you’d have to imagine that huge groups like this, with over 100 members, would have to be easy to spot, especially given it’s been running so long.

The Internet in general needs less censorship. If you disagree with a viewpoint, that should be the end of it.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots”.