Digg Patriots: Crowdsourcing Censorship of Progressive Topics

[blogslut]

I was directed to this http://blogs.alternet.org/oleoleolson/2010/08/05/massive-censorship-of-digg-uncovered">Alternet article by a http://twitter.com/Karoli/status/20403300422">Re-Tweet from http://twitter.com/owillis">Oliver Willis. The OP headline is mine:

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

~snip~

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

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”...

Read the full article here: http://blogs.alternet.org/oleoleolson/2010/08/05/massive-censorship-of-digg-uncovered/

[Duer 157099]

1. Good. This kind of revelation will render sites like Digg irrelevent

Crowdsourcing cuts both ways, eventually.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. There are moments when I wonder if they are not here as well...

I could not help but check the list of names to see if any were familiar.

[Cirque du So-What]

3. I wonder what DU's 'bury brigade' calls itself?

I've got some suggestions...none repeatable in polite company :grr:

[BrklynLiberal]

4. LOL

:thumbsup:

I do have a visual..that explains a lot about their view of the world.

[Renew Deal]

5. This is the exact problem with the rec/unrec system on political sites.

And it's the reason it doesn't work, including DU.