Digg Bury Brigade: 28 negative McCain stories buried in 30 days

A close look at campaign-oriented stories on Digg shows that, in the last 30 days, at least 28 stories critical of GOP Sen. John McCain have been mysteriously "buried" — meaning enough Digg users have voted against a story that the submission may no longer appear on the site's high-traffic front page. 

[In our follow up to this post, Digg CEO Jay Adelson responds to the issue.]

Only about five Barack Obama-related stories (positive and negative) were buried in the same period.

According to Digg's search results, 10 of the 28 McCain stories were zapped after they had already graduated to the front page, including several that had received more than 700 diggs. 

The other 18 (all of which had a minimum of 180 diggs by the time I counted them) stalled out in the site's "Upcoming" section, where stories gain momentum, with the most popular entries eventually graduating to the front. 

Bloggers who have complained that their submissions were being systematically buried have postulated the existence of a pro-McCain 'Bury Brigade' — though direct evidence of such a group is elusive. The political blogger Jed Lewison of the Jed Report has recently had four of his submissions neutralized.  Those entries — none of which portrays McCain in a flattering light, are here, here, here and here. 

"My gut is that it's organized," Lewison wrote of the burying patterns. "Though whether directly with the campaign or not, I've got no idea." 

Lewison pointed to the McCain campaign's recent call to action, in which it encouraged supporters to post the candidate's talking points around the political blogosphere. 

"In my view that's not free speech," Lewison continued. "They are asking their supporters to go and disrupt the flow of the opposition."

But though the pattern is clear — anti-McCain stories are much more likely to be buried — identifying who's responsible is more difficult.  The majority of a Digg's user's actions on the site — including which stories they submitted, voted for, and commented on — are archived and publicly viewable. But information about who buries stories is invisible. Any 'Bury Brigade,' whether it's a formally organized cabal or a group of like-minded, independent activists, cannot be detected by publicly available means. 

This spreadsheet contains a list of the buried stories I found. In the case of a story that mentioned both candidates, I categorized it according to which candidate it seemed to be singling out. Also, I only counted upcoming stories that had received more than 180 votes since submission. Below that range, the number of submitted stories begins to balloon — and lower rung stories did not seem to have been buried with as much frequency. In order to tell if a story has been buried, you click the check box in Digg's search results that displays buried stories.

From this sampling at least, the Digg community's predilection for Obama was clear. Not only were very few Obama stories buried (in the upcoming sample I looked at, I found zero), but several of those that were didn't appear to be particularly critical. ("10 Best Rap Songs About Obama," for example, was not exactly mudslinging.) 

Coordinated bury may or may not be a violation of Digg's Terms of Use*, which states that artificially "altering" a story's Digg count is prohibited.  However, defining 'artificial' is tricky on a site where users are constantly lobbying other users to vote for particular stories.  Either way, bury brigading certainly runs counter to the spirit of the site, where the community at large decides which stories succeed and which don't, and a story's fate is not determined by a shady, unseen strike force.

*Clarification:  Initially I wrote that coordinated burying was "not technically a violation" of Digg's terms.  The terms don't use the word 'bury,' but Digg user MarkusGarvey suggests that "artificially altering" means the same thing, and that accounts have been banned if users request friends to bury stories.

UPDATE (5:07 pm): Digg CEO Jay Adelson said his team had checked the stories in question, and did not detect any "non-diverse" burying patterns -- meaning as far as Digg is concerned, it's not a cabal of paid operatives.  What he did say is that as a general rule, stories that are initially dugg up by a non-diverse group (i.e. a cabal) -- are then easier to bury later.  So this might be a case of mistaken identity, and what's really happening is that all the buried McCain stories were knocked off more easily because they were intitially submitted by a narrower anti-McCain group.

Comments

[Political Republican]

A pro-McCain Bury Brigade? Don't just speculate; tell me where to sign-up!

Political Republican

[Roger]

I have noticed this firsthand. Of course, very little negative Obama stories show up on Digg. Maybe the only things that show up are clearly false secret muslim rumors and are quickly and righteously buried.

Funny video of media coverage of Obama rumros: http://tinyurl.com/6jb7l6

[Eriku]

Sorry to be a noob, I only visit digg to read, watch, learn a bit, and generally be entertained by the variety of articles dugg up by its active members. I liked the fact that there was a strong source on the web that had so much support for obama, he is and has always been a genuine, likeable guy, an opinion i formed back when his chances for party leadership were absolutely zero according to "the polls".

He has been attacked by just about every news network, political analyst, fellow party members, opposing party members, the president, the vice president, basically all those who stand to lose something if he actually gets in office and attempts to change the system in any way. Those who complain that there is not enough smut on his character can find their fill on cnn or elsewhere so why make an issue out of one site where users value people like obama and ron paul?

If I don't like the content of a website i don't go back or ignore it altogether and its kind of sad that this site is drawing more and more users with a mission to educate us all with "the other side of the story" which i clearly don't give a rats ass about. Now every negative article on McCain and Palin are being labelled as possibly inaccurate by fellow diggers???

Change.

absoutely.

[MP]

maybe McCain is just simply more popular here. He now has the national polls in his favor and one can argue that those who post against really post a lot of garbage so it is only normal to bury those articles. I'm speaking from experience. I've bury many of them if they are not realistic articles or if they are downright insulting. Go McCain!