Digg elects bogus 'CBS Censorship' post story of the day

The headline of yesterday's #1 Digg story blared, “Katie Couric and CBS News Censor Embarrassing Palin Tape.” The story, from a liberal political blog called “Blue Tidal Wave,” claimed that CBS News was  withholding footage of a gaffe by Gov. Sarah Palin in order to secure future interviews from the McCain campaign.

Digg gets 16,000 story submissions every day, so any story that earns enough votes to hit the top 10 has scored a major coup.  But being elected the day’s top story, as Blue Tidal Wave’s post was, is a little like winning the web news lottery, with a windfall of readers that can number in the hundreds of thousands.

But far from winning the lottery, the readers of “Blue Tidal Wave’s” censorship post got nothing but a heaping plate of horse pucky.

The post, by an anonymous writer called “The Saint,” began by quoting from a story by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. Even after a week of widely mocked footage from the Palin-Couric interviews, Kurtz wrote, “the worst may be yet to come for Palin; sources say CBS has two more responses on tape that will likely prove embarrassing.”

The Saint took Kurtz’s revelation and twisted it  into an accusation of censorship, complete with its own journalistic-sounding statement: “CBS Evening News insiders say the censoring of the Palin interview was orchestrated by CBS News heads and Couric in an effort to show the McCain campaign that they should choose the struggling nightly news program for their exclusive interviews.”

I reached the Saint by e-mail, and he admitted that the “CBS Evening News insiders” he was referring to was  “a friend” at CBS whom he’d spoken to “off hand” and “never had permission to source.” The friend “didn’t know if CBS would air all of the interview,” the Saint wrote, “and I concluded that they might be holding back the footage.”

What The Saint didn’t know—or didn’t bother to find out—is that CBS News had shot the  material in question last Wednesday, Sept. 24 — when Palin was in New York — as part of its separate “Questions” series. That feature, started during the primaries,  has Couric asking multiple candidates identical questions. The “Vice Presidential Questions” segment — which included a matching interview with Sen. Joe Biden — had been scheduled to air this week all along.

In fact, a “Questions” segment in which  Couric asked the candidates about Roe vs.  Wade aired Wednesday night, while “Blue Tidal Wave’s” post claiming CBS was censoring that very footage was still in Digg’s top 10.   (In the clip, Palin was unable to name any U.S. Supreme Court cases she disagreed with – an awkward moment to be sure, but in light of last week’s Couric-Palin footage, nothing to stop the presses for.)

On the Internet, faulty information seems to follow the path of least resistance. It gets passed on by the people who are most eager to believe it, and therefore least likely to find out if it’s actually true. On Digg, a site that tends to elevate left-leaning stories, the “CBS censorship” canard found a willing audience, and so rather than being called out as dubious and slanted, the bogus story shot to the top of the list.   

“The notion that CBS was ‘censoring’ this information is, of course, absurd,” Kurtz wrote to me. “In today’s digital universe, some of the more hyperpartisan or hyperventilating practitioners take a fact, add dashes or supposition or conspiracy theory, and cook up a half-baked stew.”

And if there’s one thing you learn from reporting on the Web, it’s to be careful what you swallow.

Tapping into a $28.7-million round of fresh venture capital, Digg.com will embark on a major expansion over the next year, with plans to double its staff from 75 to 150 as well as relocate to a San Francisco headquarters roughly three times the size of its current offices. Among the site's development plans will be the addition of international and multilingual interfaces to the existing site and a renewed shift in personalizing content for individual users.

"This is reactive to some of our growth success," said Digg CEO Jay Adelson.  "We saw some significant acceleration in revenue growth."  Adelson said that Digg now attracts 30 million unique visitors every month (UPDATE: ComScore shows Digg with only 16M worldwide uniques in August), and the company says advertising sales have helped nearly triple Digg's revenue since this time last year.

According to Adelson, the majority of the staff bulk-up will be aimed at engineering and R&D. "We've only completed about 10% to 15% of our ideas of our vision for Digg, and we've still got a lot of ideas in the hopper. Having the engineers here to execute on all that code work — that's a huge part of all this." The new office, which won't be ready until the end of 2009, is a quarter-mile away from Digg's current location in the Portrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

Adelson was not specific about Digg's next round of features, but in this video from the Web 2.0 Expo (h/t TechCrunch), Adelson spoke at length about what he called "Hyper-personalization," a model that, instead of showing users the most popular stories, would make guesses about what they'd like based on information mined from the giant demographic veins of social networks. This approach would essentially turn every user into a big Venn diagram of interests, and send them stories to match.

Adelson said Digg had not yet deployed local views of the content, but that it was in the planning stages. "We do believe the implicit groupings of users and interests that we use in the recommendation engine will certainly play a role in the future of Digg and how we can address localities and topics."

The new initiative will seek to boost Digg's connections with other media outlets — the site partnered with CBS News' Katie Couric for the conventions last month — as well as offering media websites a new set of analytical tools to evaluate how their content performs among Digg users.

Digg was started on a shoestring budget by founder Kevin Rose in 2004 and has received two rounds of funding since then, a $2.8-million "A" round in 2005 followed by an $8.5-million "B" in late 2006. The "C" round is being led by Highland Capital Partners but includes previous investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital.

— David Sarno

Shovel vs. hammer

For a website that prides itself on its democratic approach to news selection, Digg has a tricky line to walk when it comes to silencing its users. 

As the number of Diggers increases -- the site says it had 29 million visitors last month -- its moderators are finding that banning rogue users and erasing their contributions is becoming a daily occurrence.  But as with many evolving social media communities, the site's growth seems to be outpacing its ability to keep members informed about what's OK and what's not. 

Last Friday morning, Badwithcomputer, a Digg top user whom Web Scout profiled last month, got quite a surprise when he discovered his account had been disabled.

"I woke up around 11 to find out I wasn't able to log in," he said via instant message. As usual with a Digg ban, he'd received no warning that a ban was impending. His account was restored, again without notice, two hours later. For the duration of the ban, the stories he'd submitted vanished from the active parts of the site.

When Badwithcomputer contacted Digg's support team via e-mail, he was sent an excerpt of Digg's terms of service, stating that users may not use the site to sell items. He thinks his Obama T-shirt submission did it. But he doesn't know for sure.

It's probably not fair to compare the way Digg enforces its rules to any real justice system -- after all, this is a quirky social website we're talking about, not a law-bound nation of human beings. But given that many Digg users spend significant time and energy providing the site with content, there's an argument that banning users from the site with no warning for no clear reason and without a publicly viewable record is not what you'd call a people-first approach.

Company CEO Jay Adelson says the number of bans are in line with other social media sites and that ban information is kept secret for a reason. "Users have requested that we respect their privacy and not draw particular attention to these situations," he said by phone.

Adelson maintains that users of the site are safe as long as they abide by the rules they agreed to when they signed up. "The only time a comment, a submission or anything on Digg is ever deleted is if it's in violation of our terms of service," he said.

But abiding by those terms can be something of a guessing game. "Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason," they say, "or for no reason at all." 

Though that might remind you of a police state, Digg certainly isn't that.  For one thing, it doesn't have enough police to qualify. Adelson says at any given time, the site has only two moderators working to enforce the terms of service across the entire site -- clearly not enough manpower to offer users detailed explanations of why they're being punished.

But without those explanations, the site's application of its own rules can seem unpredictable. 

Digg's moderators, for instance, seemed to keep an extra close eye on recent activity by CBS anchor Katie Couric, who asked the site's users to submit questions she could use for interviews at the recent political conventions. Several users complained that their accounts were suspended after they'd placed critical comments on that story, and that the comments themselves were erased.

Digg user Paul Weber said in an e-mail that he was banned for a comment that criticized Couric for her membership on the Council on Foreign Relations. "I don't see how I violated terms of service," Weber wrote in an e-mail to Digg. "I have seen much worse attacks on Ron Paul and Bob Barr and Cynthia McKinney and myself, which were not even based in truth." 

Nathan Oyler, a longtime user with dozens of front-page stories under his belt, said he was banned for comments portraying Couric and CBS in a negative light. According to Oyler, Digg deleted several of his comments, including one where he called her "vapid" and uneducated on political issues, another where he listed CBS' company assets, and a third asking why his comments were being removed.

Digg's support team referred Oyler to the TOS section condemning users who "abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Digg users" and also highlighted the "no reason at all" clause.

When asked about the Couric-related banning, a Digg spokesperson wrote that "less than ten" accounts had been disabled for activity on the Couric post — and that several of the banned users were repeat TOS-offenders.  Digg did not say how many comments were deleted.

While even a single violation can warrant an account deletion, Digg often reinstates accounts as long as they agree to follow the TOS in the future -- which Oyler did. "So I had to reaffirm that they can delete anything I write at any time," Oyler wrote, "including for complaining about them removing my comments."

-- Mark Milian

Sheigh Crabtree and David Sarno contributed to this report.

Digg user badwithcomputer. (Photo credit: Dashiell)

We have all heard from the pioneers of social media. Interviews with Kevin Rose on Digg, Biz Stone on Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook are a dime a dozen.

But you, online reader, were Time's person of the year in 2006. You are what keeps social media fresh and worth reading (well, some of the time).

As part of a new Web Scout series, we talk to you -- well, maybe not you, per se, but the users out there who spend hours per day contributing content and building an almost celebrity status on their platforms of choice.

First up is Digg user badwithcomputer, who has consistently been a top 10 submitter to the social news website for the past year since he opened his account.

On Digg, his "real name" is Henry Hill, which actually turns out to be a homage to the 1990s flick "Goodfellas." Outside the virtual world, the Los Angeles resident is Dashiell, a 21-year-old student at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school in Claremont.

Badwithcomputer's beginnings on Digg were much like that of anyone just getting into the site. He would submit stories he thought were interesting and nobody seemed to agree with him. His submissions would get only a couple of votes, or Diggs, and then fall off the map. Dashiell chronicles his humble beginnings in our instant-message conversation.

badwithcomputer: One day I got lucky with some video I found on Break and was instantly hooked on the inexplicable nerdy joy of seeing something I submitted become popular. I haven't looked back.

LA Times: I know what you mean.

BWC: Yeah, and that's the problem. Most users just throw their hands up and leave a million comments about how broke the system is without taking a look at their activity on the site. Consistently submit quality content that is of interest to a wide range of people and things will eventually start rolling.

Or not, and that's the often irritable problem with Digg for a lot of people. But what can you do?

You could try talking to other Diggers. Dashiell keeps in contact with top users, like Zaibatsu, the third all-time submitter, and head honcho MrBabyMan. And their chats take place through more traditional means, not using Digg's "shout" feature, an internal system for communicating and sharing stories of which Dashiell is not a fan.

BWC: I haven't talked to MrBabyMan in a while but we have each other's screen names. Every now and then i get the pleasure of a brief phone chat with Zaibatsu where we talk shop and do a cursory catchup. MakiMaki is an android from the future and I'm worried that if I talk to him he'll drain all my Digg power, like Shang Tsung style.

MakiMaki, by the way ... never sent a single shout and he is hitting the front page more than anyone else these days. Shows you how much you can rely on the shout system if you think you can register over night and just start shouting to a thousand friends.

In addition to those, Dashiell says he respects Digg users jaybol and Brian Cuban, brother of billionaire entrepreneur Mark.

Unlike many of Digg's top users, Dashiell doesn't have a slew of RSS feeds he is subscribed to. He searches for Diggable content the same way the Internet's earliest adopters found links to post on Usenet message boards: by surfing his favorite websites, which include Kotaku, Gawker, Break and Funny or Die. E-mail solicitations probably aren't the best idea for "helping" him find your content.

BWC: Sometimes I get IM's or emails from sites basically just wondering how they can get something on the front page. Every now and then i'll get a real suspect email that is just straight up offering money in exchange for a front page submission and I just forward those to abuse@digg.com.

It just comes with the territory of being on the top 50 digg users list.

Badwithcomputer is notorious for his funny, edgy, eye-grabbing headlines. We asked him to pick out some of his all-time favorites, but of all the ones he mentioned, THIS IS HOW I MAKE BREAD is the only story suitable for publication due to its lack of obscenity.

BWC: That was a great submission just because you rarely see something with all caps get popular, but it totally fit in this case.

As trends and the site's community rapidly change, Dashiell seems to be ahead of the curve. His number of front-page hits -- nearly three every day for the last 30 days -- aren't slowing down, and he will likely be a major player on the site for a very long time.

"I got 99 problems but a Digg ain't one," he wrote.

-- Mark Milian

The other day on the heels of our story on the mass burial of anti-McCain stories on Digg, I had a chance to speak with Digg CEO Jay Adelson about the phenomenon. 

Adelson suggested that the 'Bury Brigade' interpretation of the facts -- where some shady group of McCain crusaders has been systematically sniping all the McCain-critical Digg submissions -- was probably a little bit backward.

First of all, he said, "we checked to make sure there was nothing goofy going on. We checked the buries, and the burying algorithm was working as designed."

From di66.net.

Designed? As in, designed to enable Orwellian thought policing so McCain and his vast army of social media hatchet men can relentlessly prune Digg into a topiary of GOP agitprop? 

Quite the contrary. Adelson meant that Digg is designed to prevent secret manipulation -- as much for burying content as for promoting it. In other words, by that logic the McCain stories vanished because they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Adelson explained: "If our algorithm determines — and I’m not pointing at any particular content right now — that maybe there’s some manipulation going on in the way the story is dugg up, then it takes less effort to get it buried." (emph. added)

And that's where the story inverts. If Adelson's Principle applies here, those buried stories were disappearing not because the group burying them was narrow and biased, but because the group digging them was.

Which means, by the Digg logic Adelson cites, the support base for those stories would be so flimsy and homogeneous, that a few well aimed buries could've been enough to knock them down. 

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.

Digg gets $28.7M boost, plans to double size, go global

Tapping into a $28.7-million round of fresh venture capital, Digg.com will embark on a major expansion over the next year, with plans to double its staff from 75 to 150 as well as relocate to a San Francisco headquarters roughly three times the size of its current offices. Among the site's development plans will be the addition of international and multilingual interfaces to the existing site and a renewed shift in personalizing content for individual users.

"This is reactive to some of our growth success," said Digg CEO Jay Adelson.  "We saw some significant acceleration in revenue growth."  Adelson said that Digg now attracts 30 million unique visitors every month (UPDATE: ComScore shows Digg with only 16M worldwide uniques in August), and the company says advertising sales have helped nearly triple Digg's revenue since this time last year.

According to Adelson, the majority of the staff bulk-up will be aimed at engineering and R&D. "We've only completed about 10% to 15% of our ideas of our vision for Digg, and we've still got a lot of ideas in the hopper. Having the engineers here to execute on all that code work — that's a huge part of all this." The new office, which won't be ready until the end of 2009, is a quarter-mile away from Digg's current location in the Portrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

Adelson was not specific about Digg's next round of features, but in this video from the Web 2.0 Expo (h/t TechCrunch), Adelson spoke at length about what he called "Hyper-personalization," a model that, instead of showing users the most popular stories, would make guesses about what they'd like based on information mined from the giant demographic veins of social networks. This approach would essentially turn every user into a big Venn diagram of interests, and send them stories to match.

Adelson said Digg had not yet deployed local views of the content, but that it was in the planning stages. "We do believe the implicit groupings of users and interests that we use in the recommendation engine will certainly play a role in the future of Digg and how we can address localities and topics."

The new initiative will seek to boost Digg's connections with other media outlets — the site partnered with CBS News' Katie Couric for the conventions last month — as well as offering media websites a new set of analytical tools to evaluate how their content performs among Digg users.

Digg was started on a shoestring budget by founder Kevin Rose in 2004 and has received two rounds of funding since then, a $2.8-million "A" round in 2005 followed by an $8.5-million "B" in late 2006. The "C" round is being led by Highland Capital Partners but includes previous investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital.

— David Sarno

Shovel vs. hammer

For a website that prides itself on its democratic approach to news selection, Digg has a tricky line to walk when it comes to silencing its users. 

As the number of Diggers increases -- the site says it had 29 million visitors last month -- its moderators are finding that banning rogue users and erasing their contributions is becoming a daily occurrence.  But as with many evolving social media communities, the site's growth seems to be outpacing its ability to keep members informed about what's OK and what's not. 

Last Friday morning, Badwithcomputer, a Digg top user whom Web Scout profiled last month, got quite a surprise when he discovered his account had been disabled.

"I woke up around 11 to find out I wasn't able to log in," he said via instant message. As usual with a Digg ban, he'd received no warning that a ban was impending. His account was restored, again without notice, two hours later. For the duration of the ban, the stories he'd submitted vanished from the active parts of the site.

When Badwithcomputer contacted Digg's support team via e-mail, he was sent an excerpt of Digg's terms of service, stating that users may not use the site to sell items. He thinks his Obama T-shirt submission did it. But he doesn't know for sure.

It's probably not fair to compare the way Digg enforces its rules to any real justice system -- after all, this is a quirky social website we're talking about, not a law-bound nation of human beings. But given that many Digg users spend significant time and energy providing the site with content, there's an argument that banning users from the site with no warning for no clear reason and without a publicly viewable record is not what you'd call a people-first approach.

Company CEO Jay Adelson says the number of bans are in line with other social media sites and that ban information is kept secret for a reason. "Users have requested that we respect their privacy and not draw particular attention to these situations," he said by phone.

Adelson maintains that users of the site are safe as long as they abide by the rules they agreed to when they signed up. "The only time a comment, a submission or anything on Digg is ever deleted is if it's in violation of our terms of service," he said.

But abiding by those terms can be something of a guessing game. "Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason," they say, "or for no reason at all." 

Though that might remind you of a police state, Digg certainly isn't that.  For one thing, it doesn't have enough police to qualify. Adelson says at any given time, the site has only two moderators working to enforce the terms of service across the entire site -- clearly not enough manpower to offer users detailed explanations of why they're being punished.

But without those explanations, the site's application of its own rules can seem unpredictable. 

Digg's moderators, for instance, seemed to keep an extra close eye on recent activity by CBS anchor Katie Couric, who asked the site's users to submit questions she could use for interviews at the recent political conventions. Several users complained that their accounts were suspended after they'd placed critical comments on that story, and that the comments themselves were erased.

Digg user Paul Weber said in an e-mail that he was banned for a comment that criticized Couric for her membership on the Council on Foreign Relations. "I don't see how I violated terms of service," Weber wrote in an e-mail to Digg. "I have seen much worse attacks on Ron Paul and Bob Barr and Cynthia McKinney and myself, which were not even based in truth." 

Nathan Oyler, a longtime user with dozens of front-page stories under his belt, said he was banned for comments portraying Couric and CBS in a negative light. According to Oyler, Digg deleted several of his comments, including one where he called her "vapid" and uneducated on political issues, another where he listed CBS' company assets, and a third asking why his comments were being removed.

Digg's support team referred Oyler to the TOS section condemning users who "abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Digg users" and also highlighted the "no reason at all" clause.

When asked about the Couric-related banning, a Digg spokesperson wrote that "less than ten" accounts had been disabled for activity on the Couric post — and that several of the banned users were repeat TOS-offenders.  Digg did not say how many comments were deleted.

While even a single violation can warrant an account deletion, Digg often reinstates accounts as long as they agree to follow the TOS in the future -- which Oyler did. "So I had to reaffirm that they can delete anything I write at any time," Oyler wrote, "including for complaining about them removing my comments."

-- Mark Milian

Sheigh Crabtree and David Sarno contributed to this report.

Digg user badwithcomputer. (Photo credit: Dashiell)

We have all heard from the pioneers of social media. Interviews with Kevin Rose on Digg, Biz Stone on Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook are a dime a dozen.

But you, online reader, were Time's person of the year in 2006. You are what keeps social media fresh and worth reading (well, some of the time).

As part of a new Web Scout series, we talk to you -- well, maybe not you, per se, but the users out there who spend hours per day contributing content and building an almost celebrity status on their platforms of choice.

First up is Digg user badwithcomputer, who has consistently been a top 10 submitter to the social news website for the past year since he opened his account.

On Digg, his "real name" is Henry Hill, which actually turns out to be a homage to the 1990s flick "Goodfellas." Outside the virtual world, the Los Angeles resident is Dashiell, a 21-year-old student at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school in Claremont.

Badwithcomputer's beginnings on Digg were much like that of anyone just getting into the site. He would submit stories he thought were interesting and nobody seemed to agree with him. His submissions would get only a couple of votes, or Diggs, and then fall off the map. Dashiell chronicles his humble beginnings in our instant-message conversation.

badwithcomputer: One day I got lucky with some video I found on Break and was instantly hooked on the inexplicable nerdy joy of seeing something I submitted become popular. I haven't looked back.

LA Times: I know what you mean.

BWC: Yeah, and that's the problem. Most users just throw their hands up and leave a million comments about how broke the system is without taking a look at their activity on the site. Consistently submit quality content that is of interest to a wide range of people and things will eventually start rolling.

Or not, and that's the often irritable problem with Digg for a lot of people. But what can you do?

You could try talking to other Diggers. Dashiell keeps in contact with top users, like Zaibatsu, the third all-time submitter, and head honcho MrBabyMan. And their chats take place through more traditional means, not using Digg's "shout" feature, an internal system for communicating and sharing stories of which Dashiell is not a fan.

BWC: I haven't talked to MrBabyMan in a while but we have each other's screen names. Every now and then i get the pleasure of a brief phone chat with Zaibatsu where we talk shop and do a cursory catchup. MakiMaki is an android from the future and I'm worried that if I talk to him he'll drain all my Digg power, like Shang Tsung style.

MakiMaki, by the way ... never sent a single shout and he is hitting the front page more than anyone else these days. Shows you how much you can rely on the shout system if you think you can register over night and just start shouting to a thousand friends.

In addition to those, Dashiell says he respects Digg users jaybol and Brian Cuban, brother of billionaire entrepreneur Mark.

Unlike many of Digg's top users, Dashiell doesn't have a slew of RSS feeds he is subscribed to. He searches for Diggable content the same way the Internet's earliest adopters found links to post on Usenet message boards: by surfing his favorite websites, which include Kotaku, Gawker, Break and Funny or Die. E-mail solicitations probably aren't the best idea for "helping" him find your content.

BWC: Sometimes I get IM's or emails from sites basically just wondering how they can get something on the front page. Every now and then i'll get a real suspect email that is just straight up offering money in exchange for a front page submission and I just forward those to abuse@digg.com.

It just comes with the territory of being on the top 50 digg users list.

Badwithcomputer is notorious for his funny, edgy, eye-grabbing headlines. We asked him to pick out some of his all-time favorites, but of all the ones he mentioned, THIS IS HOW I MAKE BREAD is the only story suitable for publication due to its lack of obscenity.

BWC: That was a great submission just because you rarely see something with all caps get popular, but it totally fit in this case.

As trends and the site's community rapidly change, Dashiell seems to be ahead of the curve. His number of front-page hits -- nearly three every day for the last 30 days -- aren't slowing down, and he will likely be a major player on the site for a very long time.

"I got 99 problems but a Digg ain't one," he wrote.

-- Mark Milian

The other day on the heels of our story on the mass burial of anti-McCain stories on Digg, I had a chance to speak with Digg CEO Jay Adelson about the phenomenon. 

Adelson suggested that the 'Bury Brigade' interpretation of the facts -- where some shady group of McCain crusaders has been systematically sniping all the McCain-critical Digg submissions -- was probably a little bit backward.

First of all, he said, "we checked to make sure there was nothing goofy going on. We checked the buries, and the burying algorithm was working as designed."

From di66.net.

Designed? As in, designed to enable Orwellian thought policing so McCain and his vast army of social media hatchet men can relentlessly prune Digg into a topiary of GOP agitprop? 

Quite the contrary. Adelson meant that Digg is designed to prevent secret manipulation -- as much for burying content as for promoting it. In other words, by that logic the McCain stories vanished because they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Adelson explained: "If our algorithm determines — and I’m not pointing at any particular content right now — that maybe there’s some manipulation going on in the way the story is dugg up, then it takes less effort to get it buried." (emph. added)

And that's where the story inverts. If Adelson's Principle applies here, those buried stories were disappearing not because the group burying them was narrow and biased, but because the group digging them was.

Which means, by the Digg logic Adelson cites, the support base for those stories would be so flimsy and homogeneous, that a few well aimed buries could've been enough to knock them down. 

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.

Handling executions in a Digg democracy

Shovel vs. hammer

For a website that prides itself on its democratic approach to news selection, Digg has a tricky line to walk when it comes to silencing its users. 

As the number of Diggers increases -- the site says it had 29 million visitors last month -- its moderators are finding that banning rogue users and erasing their contributions is becoming a daily occurrence.  But as with many evolving social media communities, the site's growth seems to be outpacing its ability to keep members informed about what's OK and what's not. 

Last Friday morning, Badwithcomputer, a Digg top user whom Web Scout profiled last month, got quite a surprise when he discovered his account had been disabled.

"I woke up around 11 to find out I wasn't able to log in," he said via instant message. As usual with a Digg ban, he'd received no warning that a ban was impending. His account was restored, again without notice, two hours later. For the duration of the ban, the stories he'd submitted vanished from the active parts of the site.

When Badwithcomputer contacted Digg's support team via e-mail, he was sent an excerpt of Digg's terms of service, stating that users may not use the site to sell items. He thinks his Obama T-shirt submission did it. But he doesn't know for sure.

It's probably not fair to compare the way Digg enforces its rules to any real justice system -- after all, this is a quirky social website we're talking about, not a law-bound nation of human beings. But given that many Digg users spend significant time and energy providing the site with content, there's an argument that banning users from the site with no warning for no clear reason and without a publicly viewable record is not what you'd call a people-first approach.

Company CEO Jay Adelson says the number of bans are in line with other social media sites and that ban information is kept secret for a reason. "Users have requested that we respect their privacy and not draw particular attention to these situations," he said by phone.

Adelson maintains that users of the site are safe as long as they abide by the rules they agreed to when they signed up. "The only time a comment, a submission or anything on Digg is ever deleted is if it's in violation of our terms of service," he said.

But abiding by those terms can be something of a guessing game. "Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason," they say, "or for no reason at all." 

Though that might remind you of a police state, Digg certainly isn't that.  For one thing, it doesn't have enough police to qualify. Adelson says at any given time, the site has only two moderators working to enforce the terms of service across the entire site -- clearly not enough manpower to offer users detailed explanations of why they're being punished.

But without those explanations, the site's application of its own rules can seem unpredictable. 

Digg's moderators, for instance, seemed to keep an extra close eye on recent activity by CBS anchor Katie Couric, who asked the site's users to submit questions she could use for interviews at the recent political conventions. Several users complained that their accounts were suspended after they'd placed critical comments on that story, and that the comments themselves were erased.

Digg user Paul Weber said in an e-mail that he was banned for a comment that criticized Couric for her membership on the Council on Foreign Relations. "I don't see how I violated terms of service," Weber wrote in an e-mail to Digg. "I have seen much worse attacks on Ron Paul and Bob Barr and Cynthia McKinney and myself, which were not even based in truth." 

Nathan Oyler, a longtime user with dozens of front-page stories under his belt, said he was banned for comments portraying Couric and CBS in a negative light. According to Oyler, Digg deleted several of his comments, including one where he called her "vapid" and uneducated on political issues, another where he listed CBS' company assets, and a third asking why his comments were being removed.

Digg's support team referred Oyler to the TOS section condemning users who "abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Digg users" and also highlighted the "no reason at all" clause.

When asked about the Couric-related banning, a Digg spokesperson wrote that "less than ten" accounts had been disabled for activity on the Couric post — and that several of the banned users were repeat TOS-offenders.  Digg did not say how many comments were deleted.

While even a single violation can warrant an account deletion, Digg often reinstates accounts as long as they agree to follow the TOS in the future -- which Oyler did. "So I had to reaffirm that they can delete anything I write at any time," Oyler wrote, "including for complaining about them removing my comments."

-- Mark Milian

Sheigh Crabtree and David Sarno contributed to this report.

Digg user badwithcomputer. (Photo credit: Dashiell)

We have all heard from the pioneers of social media. Interviews with Kevin Rose on Digg, Biz Stone on Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook are a dime a dozen.

But you, online reader, were Time's person of the year in 2006. You are what keeps social media fresh and worth reading (well, some of the time).

As part of a new Web Scout series, we talk to you -- well, maybe not you, per se, but the users out there who spend hours per day contributing content and building an almost celebrity status on their platforms of choice.

First up is Digg user badwithcomputer, who has consistently been a top 10 submitter to the social news website for the past year since he opened his account.

On Digg, his "real name" is Henry Hill, which actually turns out to be a homage to the 1990s flick "Goodfellas." Outside the virtual world, the Los Angeles resident is Dashiell, a 21-year-old student at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school in Claremont.

Badwithcomputer's beginnings on Digg were much like that of anyone just getting into the site. He would submit stories he thought were interesting and nobody seemed to agree with him. His submissions would get only a couple of votes, or Diggs, and then fall off the map. Dashiell chronicles his humble beginnings in our instant-message conversation.

badwithcomputer: One day I got lucky with some video I found on Break and was instantly hooked on the inexplicable nerdy joy of seeing something I submitted become popular. I haven't looked back.

LA Times: I know what you mean.

BWC: Yeah, and that's the problem. Most users just throw their hands up and leave a million comments about how broke the system is without taking a look at their activity on the site. Consistently submit quality content that is of interest to a wide range of people and things will eventually start rolling.

Or not, and that's the often irritable problem with Digg for a lot of people. But what can you do?

You could try talking to other Diggers. Dashiell keeps in contact with top users, like Zaibatsu, the third all-time submitter, and head honcho MrBabyMan. And their chats take place through more traditional means, not using Digg's "shout" feature, an internal system for communicating and sharing stories of which Dashiell is not a fan.

BWC: I haven't talked to MrBabyMan in a while but we have each other's screen names. Every now and then i get the pleasure of a brief phone chat with Zaibatsu where we talk shop and do a cursory catchup. MakiMaki is an android from the future and I'm worried that if I talk to him he'll drain all my Digg power, like Shang Tsung style.

MakiMaki, by the way ... never sent a single shout and he is hitting the front page more than anyone else these days. Shows you how much you can rely on the shout system if you think you can register over night and just start shouting to a thousand friends.

In addition to those, Dashiell says he respects Digg users jaybol and Brian Cuban, brother of billionaire entrepreneur Mark.

Unlike many of Digg's top users, Dashiell doesn't have a slew of RSS feeds he is subscribed to. He searches for Diggable content the same way the Internet's earliest adopters found links to post on Usenet message boards: by surfing his favorite websites, which include Kotaku, Gawker, Break and Funny or Die. E-mail solicitations probably aren't the best idea for "helping" him find your content.

BWC: Sometimes I get IM's or emails from sites basically just wondering how they can get something on the front page. Every now and then i'll get a real suspect email that is just straight up offering money in exchange for a front page submission and I just forward those to abuse@digg.com.

It just comes with the territory of being on the top 50 digg users list.

Badwithcomputer is notorious for his funny, edgy, eye-grabbing headlines. We asked him to pick out some of his all-time favorites, but of all the ones he mentioned, THIS IS HOW I MAKE BREAD is the only story suitable for publication due to its lack of obscenity.

BWC: That was a great submission just because you rarely see something with all caps get popular, but it totally fit in this case.

As trends and the site's community rapidly change, Dashiell seems to be ahead of the curve. His number of front-page hits -- nearly three every day for the last 30 days -- aren't slowing down, and he will likely be a major player on the site for a very long time.

"I got 99 problems but a Digg ain't one," he wrote.

-- Mark Milian

The other day on the heels of our story on the mass burial of anti-McCain stories on Digg, I had a chance to speak with Digg CEO Jay Adelson about the phenomenon. 

Adelson suggested that the 'Bury Brigade' interpretation of the facts -- where some shady group of McCain crusaders has been systematically sniping all the McCain-critical Digg submissions -- was probably a little bit backward.

First of all, he said, "we checked to make sure there was nothing goofy going on. We checked the buries, and the burying algorithm was working as designed."

From di66.net.

Designed? As in, designed to enable Orwellian thought policing so McCain and his vast army of social media hatchet men can relentlessly prune Digg into a topiary of GOP agitprop? 

Quite the contrary. Adelson meant that Digg is designed to prevent secret manipulation -- as much for burying content as for promoting it. In other words, by that logic the McCain stories vanished because they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Adelson explained: "If our algorithm determines — and I’m not pointing at any particular content right now — that maybe there’s some manipulation going on in the way the story is dugg up, then it takes less effort to get it buried." (emph. added)

And that's where the story inverts. If Adelson's Principle applies here, those buried stories were disappearing not because the group burying them was narrow and biased, but because the group digging them was.

Which means, by the Digg logic Adelson cites, the support base for those stories would be so flimsy and homogeneous, that a few well aimed buries could've been enough to knock them down. 

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.

Social Status: Digg's badwithcomputer talks shop

Digg user badwithcomputer. (Photo credit: Dashiell)

We have all heard from the pioneers of social media. Interviews with Kevin Rose on Digg, Biz Stone on Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook are a dime a dozen.

But you, online reader, were Time's person of the year in 2006. You are what keeps social media fresh and worth reading (well, some of the time).

As part of a new Web Scout series, we talk to you -- well, maybe not you, per se, but the users out there who spend hours per day contributing content and building an almost celebrity status on their platforms of choice.

First up is Digg user badwithcomputer, who has consistently been a top 10 submitter to the social news website for the past year since he opened his account.

On Digg, his "real name" is Henry Hill, which actually turns out to be a homage to the 1990s flick "Goodfellas." Outside the virtual world, the Los Angeles resident is Dashiell, a 21-year-old student at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school in Claremont.

Badwithcomputer's beginnings on Digg were much like that of anyone just getting into the site. He would submit stories he thought were interesting and nobody seemed to agree with him. His submissions would get only a couple of votes, or Diggs, and then fall off the map. Dashiell chronicles his humble beginnings in our instant-message conversation.

badwithcomputer: One day I got lucky with some video I found on Break and was instantly hooked on the inexplicable nerdy joy of seeing something I submitted become popular. I haven't looked back.

LA Times: I know what you mean.

BWC: Yeah, and that's the problem. Most users just throw their hands up and leave a million comments about how broke the system is without taking a look at their activity on the site. Consistently submit quality content that is of interest to a wide range of people and things will eventually start rolling.

Or not, and that's the often irritable problem with Digg for a lot of people. But what can you do?

You could try talking to other Diggers. Dashiell keeps in contact with top users, like Zaibatsu, the third all-time submitter, and head honcho MrBabyMan. And their chats take place through more traditional means, not using Digg's "shout" feature, an internal system for communicating and sharing stories of which Dashiell is not a fan.

BWC: I haven't talked to MrBabyMan in a while but we have each other's screen names. Every now and then i get the pleasure of a brief phone chat with Zaibatsu where we talk shop and do a cursory catchup. MakiMaki is an android from the future and I'm worried that if I talk to him he'll drain all my Digg power, like Shang Tsung style.

MakiMaki, by the way ... never sent a single shout and he is hitting the front page more than anyone else these days. Shows you how much you can rely on the shout system if you think you can register over night and just start shouting to a thousand friends.

In addition to those, Dashiell says he respects Digg users jaybol and Brian Cuban, brother of billionaire entrepreneur Mark.

Unlike many of Digg's top users, Dashiell doesn't have a slew of RSS feeds he is subscribed to. He searches for Diggable content the same way the Internet's earliest adopters found links to post on Usenet message boards: by surfing his favorite websites, which include Kotaku, Gawker, Break and Funny or Die. E-mail solicitations probably aren't the best idea for "helping" him find your content.

BWC: Sometimes I get IM's or emails from sites basically just wondering how they can get something on the front page. Every now and then i'll get a real suspect email that is just straight up offering money in exchange for a front page submission and I just forward those to abuse@digg.com.

It just comes with the territory of being on the top 50 digg users list.

Badwithcomputer is notorious for his funny, edgy, eye-grabbing headlines. We asked him to pick out some of his all-time favorites, but of all the ones he mentioned, THIS IS HOW I MAKE BREAD is the only story suitable for publication due to its lack of obscenity.

BWC: That was a great submission just because you rarely see something with all caps get popular, but it totally fit in this case.

As trends and the site's community rapidly change, Dashiell seems to be ahead of the curve. His number of front-page hits -- nearly three every day for the last 30 days -- aren't slowing down, and he will likely be a major player on the site for a very long time.

"I got 99 problems but a Digg ain't one," he wrote.

-- Mark Milian

The other day on the heels of our story on the mass burial of anti-McCain stories on Digg, I had a chance to speak with Digg CEO Jay Adelson about the phenomenon. 

Adelson suggested that the 'Bury Brigade' interpretation of the facts -- where some shady group of McCain crusaders has been systematically sniping all the McCain-critical Digg submissions -- was probably a little bit backward.

First of all, he said, "we checked to make sure there was nothing goofy going on. We checked the buries, and the burying algorithm was working as designed."

From di66.net.

Designed? As in, designed to enable Orwellian thought policing so McCain and his vast army of social media hatchet men can relentlessly prune Digg into a topiary of GOP agitprop? 

Quite the contrary. Adelson meant that Digg is designed to prevent secret manipulation -- as much for burying content as for promoting it. In other words, by that logic the McCain stories vanished because they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Adelson explained: "If our algorithm determines — and I’m not pointing at any particular content right now — that maybe there’s some manipulation going on in the way the story is dugg up, then it takes less effort to get it buried." (emph. added)

And that's where the story inverts. If Adelson's Principle applies here, those buried stories were disappearing not because the group burying them was narrow and biased, but because the group digging them was.

Which means, by the Digg logic Adelson cites, the support base for those stories would be so flimsy and homogeneous, that a few well aimed buries could've been enough to knock them down. 

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.

Jay Adelson on why there's no McCain Bury Brigade

The other day on the heels of our story on the mass burial of anti-McCain stories on Digg, I had a chance to speak with Digg CEO Jay Adelson about the phenomenon. 

Adelson suggested that the 'Bury Brigade' interpretation of the facts -- where some shady group of McCain crusaders has been systematically sniping all the McCain-critical Digg submissions -- was probably a little bit backward.

First of all, he said, "we checked to make sure there was nothing goofy going on. We checked the buries, and the burying algorithm was working as designed."

From di66.net.

Designed? As in, designed to enable Orwellian thought policing so McCain and his vast army of social media hatchet men can relentlessly prune Digg into a topiary of GOP agitprop? 

Quite the contrary. Adelson meant that Digg is designed to prevent secret manipulation -- as much for burying content as for promoting it. In other words, by that logic the McCain stories vanished because they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Adelson explained: "If our algorithm determines — and I’m not pointing at any particular content right now — that maybe there’s some manipulation going on in the way the story is dugg up, then it takes less effort to get it buried." (emph. added)

And that's where the story inverts. If Adelson's Principle applies here, those buried stories were disappearing not because the group burying them was narrow and biased, but because the group digging them was.

Which means, by the Digg logic Adelson cites, the support base for those stories would be so flimsy and homogeneous, that a few well aimed buries could've been enough to knock them down. 

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.

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.