Those who fear the free exchange of ideas will find any means at hand to silence those with whom they disagree. Censorship involves eliminating opposing ideas and voices, ensuring that only a single opinion can be heard.
You’d think in a democratic republic such as ours, those with passionate political beliefs would value the open and honest exchange of opinions. The best solutions to any social problem can only be found when a number of opposing and divergent views can be aired and considered by all of the citizens. The hope is that the best and most practical solutions will rise to the top.
This process is circumvented, though, when one group of like-minded people decide to silence views that don’t agree with theirs. It starts by labeling those with whom you disagree unpatriotic, anti-American, enemies of the state. Once portrayed this way, the road is clear to imprison them or worse. Traveling down this road begins with small steps.
Consider the follow report from oleoleolson at AlterNet:
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 concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news, videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page views.
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”.
A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark.
The ring leader of the group is Bettverboten, who issues multiple digg and bury orders everyday. She is a Digg power user who has dugg 70,000 articles and has 1500 submits of her own (18% have gone popular) in one short year on the site. She was previously known as Lizbett before her lifetime ban for offensive and inappropriate comments, and has two sleeper accounts waiting if she gets banned again at loquaciouslola and MsBoop. She is also on Twitter, although her primary focus is Digg, where she has acquired a huge following of power users who are likely unaware that she is gaming the system, and even calling to bury some of her mutuals.
There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. They just love to hate.
The primary function of the Digg Patriots is to censor politically progressive content from the upcoming Political, Political Opinion, World News, and Business sections, so that conservative stories have a better chance to get more traction. To do this, they constantly monitor these sections, progressive submitters, and news websites.
This censorship is not restricted to political articles either. 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 are targets.
The good news in all this is that soon a new version of Digg will be put in place that may restrict this sort of activity. Still, it’s worrying that our public discourse is so vulnerable to censorship on this potentially powerful force for good called the internet.
The one thing that these people, who prefer to work in the dark and under cover of anonymity, cannot stand is exposure. The best way to curtail their dishonest behavior is to shed light on it. No one on either side of the debate over the future of this country should be to silence their opposition through such underhanded and devious means. Let’s keep the debate open to all. Let’s make sure every citizen has a chance to be heard.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Digg Gamed by Conservative Conspiracy; How Does Digg Bury It? (mashable.com)
- Digg investigates claims of conservative ‘censorship’ (guardian.co.uk)
- Conservative Digg Users Caught in Censorship Scandal (socialtimes.com)
- Right-wing group works overtime to manipulate Digg (secularnewsdaily.com)
- Conservatives Censoring Liberal Stories on Digg? (abcnews.go.com)
- Is Digg Being Hijacked by a Right-Wing Fringe Group? [Conspiracies] (gawker.com)
- Digg, Wikileaks, and Censorship, American Style (fastcompany.com)












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