I blogged on 8/3/10 about Digg censorship, revealed in the Wikileaks documents. I’m more inclined to believe those sorts of revelations than anything about foreign policy, where I kind of doubt anyone would let out any really sensitive new information so cavalierly without some ulterior motive.

Now comes a lengthy Alternet piece – the result of a year-long investigation apparently – about a conservative cabal that manipulates Digg, the social media ratings site.  My own experience with Digg has been that, as with Wikipedia there is a group of extremist Zionists that downgrades criticism of Israel or analysis of 9-11 or of the elites (as it relates to the one-world project).

It’s possible, of course, that there are several cabals…

Strictly speaking, using the label censorship for these sorts of web manipulation isn’t correct, since Digg, like Wikipedia or Google, is a private outfit. But if the material being manipulated is political, if the manipulation is being done on behalf of specific interest groups or lobbies that do also have a strong influence on government policies, then, in effect, it is political censorship of a very sophisticated and psychologically coercive kind.

The result is that while racially inflammatory and politically useless forms of expression (like the photoshopped image of Michele Obama as a chimp that appears on the first page of a Google search of her name) is widely available..and this is considered a brave blow for freedom of expression…when it comes to political news of the most vital sort, we are kept deliberately in the dark.

In the same way, all those highly incendiary sites spewing vile epithets about Jewish people manage to stay afloat, while people engaged in responsible and dispassionate criticism are denigrated as anti-Semites and driven from respectable discourse.

Racism is abhorrent to the elites?  No. They love inflammatory hate-mongers and divisive stunts (like the building of the mosque at Ground Zero).

It’s serious and informed criticism that the elites fear…

Here’s the Alternet piece

“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 more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

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”.….”