Welcome to your Friday open thread. TGIF!
A conservative cabal is caught red-handed gaming Digg to bury articles from liberal/progressive websites. But, but, Journolist!
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 DP group searches Digg for any articles from websites they want to drown out, sites such as Salon, News Junkie Post, Talking Points Memo, FreakOutNation, Five Thirty Eight, ThePublicRecord, Rawstory, The Nation, Media Matters for America, PoliticusUSA, Alternet, Fire Dog Lake, Political Carnival, TruthOut, DailyKos, The Joshua Blog, The Brad Blog, Huffington Post, Science Blogs, Smirking Chimp, Down With Tyranny, Crooks and Liars, MarioPiperni, Buzzflash, Bob Cesca’s REALLY AWESOME Blog, and The New York Times.
I’m sure you can guess what this group called themselves – Digg Patriots. Because censorship is patriotic!
Speaking of patriots, a church group that a game where you shoot at an image of Obama was a great idea:
In Roseto, Pa., a carnival company closed down a shooter game called “Alien Attack,” after complaints and news stories that President Obama was one of the targets.
The black “alien leader” is holding a scroll titled “Health Bill” and wearing a presidential seal belt buckle. He also has antennae and a troll doll with a KISS T-shirt on his shoulder.
The owner of the carnival company, Goodtime Amusements, dismissed a complaint, saying the figure is not meant to be Obama.
Of course the amusement group was shocked, SHOCKED that people thought that the target was Obama. It was just an alien! I wonder how they got that idea?
I’m just hoping that one day we’ll all look back at this era and laugh.