Conservative 'Activists' Invade Digg, Bury Thousands of 'Liberal' Stories

Digg is like the Roman Colosseum of public opinion, a place where Web content jostles for votes in the hopes of becoming "popular," and making the vaunted front page. In theory, it's a pretty democratic system. Occasionally, though, one group of like-minded users may stuff the ballots, and push an otherwise obscure article into the spotlight. Or, in some cases, they may even kill stories with which they disagree, thus indirectly tilting Digg's content in their ideological favor.

One such conservative group, known as the 'Digg Patriots' has apparently been flooding the social media news site for more than a year now, using a wide range of fake accounts to bury any story distasteful to them. Under Digg's system, any story that's buried by enough users can be killed for good, without ever getting a chance to make it to the site's front page. According to Alternet, the group has successfully buried a staggering 40,000 articles over the past 15 months, targeting any explicitly liberal-leaning pieces, as well as any "articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations." They may be total jerks, but you can't knock their ambition.

Normally, Digg's pretty vigilant about clamping down on any shenanigans. In this case, though, the Patriots evaded the sentries by orchestrating their operation via a now defunct Yahoo! group. The ring was reportedly led by a user known as Bettverboten, who has dug a whopping 70,000 articles and has submitted 1,500 articles of her own (of which 18-percent have become popular). Alternet's oleoleolson went undercover to unearth the operation, and has published a comprehensive list of every other active account associated with it. Digg, we presume, will take action very soon.

As the Next Web's Alex Wilhelm points out, anyone burying a story for political reasons certainly isn't in violation of Digg's policy. But anyone using false accounts to bury stories en masse definitely is. They may call themselves patriots, and they may like to think that they're activists. But any group of neanderthals who sabotage an online forum in an attempt to unilaterally suppress dissenting opinion certainly isn't patriotic. [From: Alternet; via: TheNextWeb, ReadWriteWeb and Gawker]

Tags: bury, censor, censorship, conservatives, Digg, DiggPatriots, liberals, politics, socialnetworking, TeaParty, TeaPartyMovement, top