I was reading this article about internet censorship in Russia by government trolls thinking, “Gee that sounds like a social media site I know”. When is censorship on social media acceptable? Is tampering with voting results ever acceptable?
Recently, one of my readers submitted an article of mine to Digg. As a result, the story not only got buried but the reader got his account deleted.
My article wasn’t the only one buried. In fact, all stories critical of Digg or pointing to recent troubles are getting summarily buried. Some people are even starting to make unsubstantiated claims that Digg’s very own staff are behind this. One thing obvious is that Digg’s staff have no intentions of reigning in this behavior.
Taking a laissez faire approach to user actions may be a necessary part of survival for a social media site but obviously any actions of consequence (such as deleting an user or banning a site) requires administrative oversight. It’s obvious from the recent cases that Digg is exercising a form of selective censorship that is hurting their credibility.
One of the main problems with Digg’s form of censorship is that the staff seem to be on the side of Digg’s very own trolls and the infamous bury brigade. The question is, do they ever objectively review sites that fall into disfavor with their users?
It wouldn’t be much of a problem except for the fact that getting banned from Digg can have big consequences considering how even sites like TechCrunch still gets a large chunk of traffic from Digg. Now, supposing Digg banned TechCrunch it wouldn’t go away just like John Chow still manages to make $3000+ a month even after getting banned. However, for a small blog struggling to get noticed and breaking Digg’s unspoken rule to “never submit your site (especially too many times)” will find themselves struggling ever more with obscurity.
Why is this wrong? Consider the Digg story “Yahoo Shamelessly Rips Off Digg and Brags About It” for a minute (disclosure: this is my submission). This was an extremely popular story and collected close to 4500 diggs. As a result Digg’s users flooded Yahoo’s official blog with nasty comments and even vandalized Yahoo! suggestion boards. Digg staff can’t claim that they didn’t see it with its popularity on the front page and the firestorm of debate within the blogosphere that followed. Digg could have easily pulled a “marked as inaccurate” or simply bury the story knowing that leaving it on the front page would cause Digg users to take drastic measures. Instead, Digg did nothing to quell the controversy or speak out. Even a “yeah, the design looks similar but leave them alone” from a member of the staff or Kevin Rose himself would surely calm down the die hard fan boys.
Censorship like this rarely works on the internet, at least outside of China. If you want to control what people say about a web application, you’ll have to limit access to your corporate LAN. If anything, Digg’s recent actions and willingness to censor contending opinions is only making the din louder.
They’re being very weird lately. Here’s a new one:
If you go to my submitted stories (http://www.digg.com/users/charbarred/news/submitted) you’ll find that I submitted 2 stories yesterday.
If you visit my homepaged stories (http://www.digg.com/users/charbarred/news/homepage) you’ll find 2 extra stories I submitted yesterday.
OK, so I’m guessing the 2 missing stories were buried, but why hide them from me? Also, wouldn’t it make more sense to just stick an icon next to them saying “buried”? Is digg ashamed of having stories being buried?
I don’t understand this curtain of silence regarding buries either. It’s like they don’t want to deal with burying stuff in an open way. I’m thinking it’s because the Digg admins want to use it as a tool of censorship for themselves as well.
1) Why is TechCrunch getting such a large amount of traffic via Digg? I thought they were “A” list bloggers over there?
2) Digg will likely never go transparent in regards to bury information. I’m sure too many stories are being buried by the mods or the same group of users and they know who is doing the burying because they have direct access to the database!
1) These A-list blogs also post a lot of dud articles so Digg helps sift out the interesting ones. Considering the number of times you see TC, Engadget, CNN or whatever I think a log of people would be shocked to see the traffic Digg sends their way.
I always make an effort to find sites that are less well-known but have really good content whenever I can. TC and others are already rich and popular enough.
2) I think it’s turning into a subterfuge for mods/admins manipulating stuff. If they ever turned it on as is, I’m sure we’ll see a couple skeletons jump out of the closet dancing to “New York, New York”.