In a report that holds grave implications for liberal writers seeking to preserve freedom and equality, Ole Ole Olson writes on Alternet today about a massive right-wing campaign to suppress free speech within the blog-search and social-media hub Digg.
Bloggers and other online writers use Digg to publicize their articles by topic to a broad online audience. Articles are voted up or down by readers, and articles with the most votes reach the most Digg users.
According to Alternet, a network of authoritarian conservative members of Digg conspired for over a year to manipulate votes and broadly bury articles that were submitted to Digg by supposed liberals.
Olson explains:
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”.
Olson provides the usernames of more than 100 member Patriots, links to recent articles that were suppressed, and the usernames of the most common targets of suppression.
By suppressing liberal speech, the network sought to leave Digg users with fewer alternatives to the conservative propaganda of the GOP, Tea Party, and Big Oil (BP in particular).
Olson says the Patriots have been using Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook to coordinate their efforts to suppress liberal speech.
