An individual who is involved in the back end of politics.wikia sent me an e-mail this morning that includes the following paragraph. Note that he is not interested in giving his opinion on any political issues, but found it interesting that statistics were supporting my assertion that Digg is biased.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Is_Digg_Biased_Against_Conservatives was
made popular with 30 diggs. But then it was buried immediately after
– literally within a minute or two (we were watching). Given your
thesis, the irony is incredible!

Incredible indeed, but not surprising. I recently wrote about my personal experiences with Digg and its flaw that allows a large group of users to actively bury stories with little or no merit, and it ended up getting quite a bit of attention.

My assertion is that there is a group of Left Wing Diggers who troll the upcoming stories in search of stories with which they disagree with, or have been asked by friends to bury. Digg has a flaw that allows stories to be Dugg or buried without ever actually visiting the story. This means that users are burying stories that they haven’t even read, which I would view as cheating the system.

Many, MANY complaints have been sent to Digg, with little or no response in return. It’s obvious that Digg is aware of the secret army of Digg trolls, yet it does not view this practice as an issue important enough to deal with.

Having this in mind, I’m left with little choice but to conclude that Digg indeed is biased towards Conservatives. Now if only they could admit such a thing.

I digress.

-Eric Odom

Personally, I’ve felt for a VERY long time that Digg is loaded with mostly Liberal minded people. It’s a shame too because Digg is a HUGE community that contains many networks of web surfers on the hunt for good news or stories. A front page story on Digg can translate into tens of thousands of instant visits, making the site a Mecca for solid web content.

What may be surprising to some is that I have no problem with the community being mostly Liberal. In fact, I encourage it because I believe in a Democratic style Internet and Digg is just that, a people driven database of news. But just because the majority of Digg users are Liberal doesn’t mean that Conservatives should be completely shut out. Unless, of course, Digg wishes to label itself as a Liberal site and begin marketing it as such.

Until then, I think Digg needs to lay off the bias and play fair on all sides. This goes for both the community, and the management.

Digg Community Bias
Now before anyone starts screaming that I don’t know what I’m talking about, let me say that I’ve submitted hundreds of stories to Digg and not one, NOT ONE Conservative story has made it past the last stage before hitting the homepage. The real meaty stories that I’ve submitted usually get Dugg very fast, but then suddenly around the 200 or 300 Digg range the story gets shot out of Digg in a way that resembles a sandblaster removing paint.

As mentioned above, I have no problem with Liberal Diggers working together to push stories to the front page, but when they start working together to keep others from the front page then I think the idea of it being a free place to submit news and stories for ANYONE kind of goes out the window.

It’s been suggested countless times, but I think Digg needs to reduce the value of the bury button. It gets abused on a very big scale and it’s keeping a good chunk of Internet users away from the great resource many of us have come to know and love, Digg.com.

The Management
Digg’s management has been known to play along with this bias by banning Conservative members for less than valid reasons. The most recent example of this is the banning of Conservative Digger, Brandon Henak of GOP3.com.

Digg management claims Brandon was informing people how to “game” the system, however, after a closer look we find that Brandon wasn’t at all doing what he is accused of.

From the original post in question:

4. Click on the Friends tab again and you should see all the news your friends have “dugg” lately, you can then digg all the interesting news you see with the knowledge that you are promoting oft ignored conservative news and opinions to millions who may never have seen it.

Notice how he doesn’t tell people WHAT to Digg, rather, he explains that users are free to Digg whatever they wish to Digg.

Is that worse than other Digg posts and stories?

The Bottom Line
It’s becoming more and more apparent that Digg is a beehive for Liberals, which is fine, but Conservatives simply aren’t allowed onto the same playing field, which is not fine.

From Digg’s own “How Digg Works” page:

#
Share
Email your friends (Diggers or non-Diggers) when you find something you Digg.

Build a friend list; then your friends can track what you’re Digging. They can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your submissions and/or your Diggs.

Regardless of your political view, don’t you agree that everyone should have the same advantage from the day they open an account at Digg?

-Eric Odom

When I first had a look at the new John McCain website I was excited to see that the campaign had fully embraced the power of the Internet, specifically the blogosphere and social networking. It only took a week to make me take back every positive thought that I first had. Now I’m convinced that the new McCain website is flat out broken and was launched WAY too early.

Apart from the technical problems, there seems to be a serious issue with censorship. In my case it appears as though I’ve been turned down for a McCainSpace blog. I applied for one of the blogs the first day the site went live… I think it was about a week ago. I received the confirmation e-mail and went through all of the steps, and here I am a week later with no word on my blog approval.

If Eric Odom, operator of ConservaBlogs.com can’t get approved, then who can? And if they just haven’t decided yet, then who the hell takes more than a week to approve a blog?

Then there is the technical problems. Since then, my account has somehow vanished. Well, it will ask me the security question to try and get a new password, but then it tries to convince me that I’m wrong about where I was born. Go figure.

John McCain’s exciting website seems to have quickly failed the test.

Next.

-Eric Odom