Right-Wing Digg Scheme Just One Example of Widespread Effort to Censor Progressive Media

DiggGate is a large scale operation of censorship was just exposed on Digg.com following an undercover investigation. This is far from the first, and certainly will not be the last time a conservative group is caught red handed attempting to decide for everyone what to read and think, in fact, it has a very long history.

DiggGate exposed the actions of a group called the Digg “Patriots”, who were actively conspiring to censor content, bait opponents into bans, use IP tricks to return from their own lifetime bans, and have numerous duplicate sleeper accounts. Their systematic manipulation of the largest social media site in the world was widespread and been going on for over a year.

Ultraconservative Pattern of Behavior

Gaming social media websites across the board is nothing new for conservative groups. The ultraconservative members of the FreeRepublic do this very openly, they call it “Freeping”. Evidence of this has been well documented, and includes the famous rigging of an NPR Poll in which 89% of 2.75 million respondents supposedly chose to side with Fox “News” over Barack Obama. YouTube has been a target of hate groups and vicious creationist slander for years. FreakOutNation has previously reported on Digger Bury Lists & White Nationalists Infiltrating Social Sites. When gaming and disinformation do not work, fringe conservative groups have even resorted to direct internet attacks in an attempt to shut websites down.

 

This pattern of behavior is mirrored in the conservative main steam media as well. For instance the very transparent attempts to grossly inflate the attendance at Glenn Beck’s 912 Tea Party in Washington D.C. last year, when some figures were 20 times the actual amount present. Fox “News”, the network devoted to giving an air of legitimacy to conservative and Republican talking points for years has been caught over and over misleading their audience, inflating figures, and blatantly lying by watchdog groups like Media Matters.

In terms of Social Media sites however, there is a long and troubled history of cheating by conservative groups. Below are the most prevalent examples involving the largest and most influential social media website of them all: Digg.com.

DIGGS AND BURIES

One of the members of the Digg Patriots (DP) Yahoo Group has a long and pretty open history of attempting to game social media sites. He is SethStruck, also known as the ConservativeBrawler. He has a presence on Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and theFreeRepublic. He runs two websites: TheConservativeBrawler and DiggsAndBuries, both on blogspot. The latter has not been updated since February when he joined DP, but has a long history of asking not only for Diggs for conservative articles, but also for buries of progressive content in an effort to suppress opposing viewpoints. To help with this goal, he created a Facebook Group, also called DiggsAndBuries.

DIGGCONS

Another way which the conservatives were openly gaming Digg was by use of a website called Diggcons, which has now been scrubbed (erased) to cover the tracks of it’s participants. Diggcons had an open and closed interface, the former could be utilized by anyone, the latter was a private board, access requiring registration and approval by the site admin.

DiggCons primary function was to aggregate conservative tweets using the #diggcons hashtag, which is still used by a few users on Twitter primarily as a means to promote their blog stories, although #diggpatriots is far more used now. There is also a DiggCons account on Twitter and a Facebook group.

Some users might recall a period when conservative groups were ‘shotgunning’ the upcoming section of Digg with every piece of propaganda from Redstate, FoxNews, WND, GlennBeck, The RNC, Rush Limbaugh, the Conservative Examiner, Michelle Malkin’s HotAir, etc. The Diggcons website was submitted to Digg.com under the title “DiggCons The HQ for Conservatives Spamming Digg”, and was quickly buried by the neoDiggCon group. Despite this, it garnered a few hundred up diggs from the greater community who were sick of the propaganda, and generated some heated conversation.