A Vast Right-Wing Digg Conspiracy Expose Shows JournoList Scandal to Be a Lot of Conservative Hot Air
August 7, 2010 |Finally, a real media conspiracy! After weeks of right-wing bloviating about the JournoList non-scandal, we finally have evidence of a secretive plot to hijack the media in pursuit of an ideological agenda. But the scandal has nothing to do with JournoList– a superhyped non-event about liberal journalists emailing each other. Instead, an investigative report written by oleoleolson published on AlterNet Thursday exposed that a cadre of conservatives, including multiple journalists, has been abusing Digg’s social media platform to bury stories with a progressive bent.
The Digg conspiracy is as devious as it is simple. Digg is a program that allows people to rate stories on the Internet. If you like a story, you click a button marked “digg.” If you don’t like it, you click “bury.” Stories that get the most diggs and the fewest buries are featured prominently on the Digg.com Web site, scoring millions of clicks from Digg’s vast audience. As AlterNet reported yesterday, a group of conservatives calling themselves the “Digg Patriots” have been aggressively voting down progressive stories, gaming the system by creating multiple accounts to cast multiple votes on stories, and adopting a secretive, coordinated effort to silence progressive ideas.
If the facts are as plain as yesterday’s report, these Digg shenanigans are a clear-cut right-wing online media conspiracy. Members of the Digg Patriots operated anonymously and did not publicly disclose their coordinated effort to crush progressive stories as part of a broad, conservative ideological agenda.
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