TheWalk.com

So this blog was brought to my attention that reveals proof that people are burying stories about Ron Paul online:

” Ron Paul Suppressed on Digg? “
the link: http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Find-Freedom.htm?At=021476

Anyway, I followed the link in that article to another site, whose sole purpose is to bury Ron Paul stories.
the link: http://buryronpaul.blogspot.com/2007/07/keep-burying-ron-paul-but-be-fair.html

Why should you care if a bunch of Internet geeks are acting like that? Because they know that the Internet is the only way people can learn that they finally have a real choice. What can you do about it? The next time you see a good story online (especially one about Dr. Paul), look to see if there is a “Digg” button on the page. Be sure to Digg the stories you like, so others will see them too.

It’s hard to believe that anyone would actively censor a guy who is already suppressed in every other media. This campaign feels more like Good-versus-Evil every day.

UPDATE:

Here is my letter to abuse@digg.com. I suggest people let them know how out-of-hand this is:

We appreciate your service and hope for the continued success of Digg.

However, it has been brought to our attention that people are abusing the “Bury” feature in your site, by putting out a militant-style message, coupled with a detailed explanation of the method’s effectiveness. Here is one prime example:

http://buryronpaul.blogspot.com/

Here they advocate linking to every user that Diggs Ron Paul stories and their friends too, so each Digg can be reversed with a “Bury”! That is a very easy thing to do, with the “Who Dug This Story” tab. But you don’t have a “Who Buried This Story” tab, so we can see that certain users are systematically burying stories that have been dugg by other specific users. You would certainly have this information in a database, to verify.

Check out this excerpt from an article titled “Ron Paul Suppressed on Digg?”:

I did a series of searches on candidate names, with the buried stories box checked and unchecked to compare. The left column is the search I did. The middle column is the number of pages of stories (roughly 12 stories a page) on Digg shown when the buried stories box is unchecked (showing the number of stories that have not been buried) and the right column is the number of stories when the buried box is checked (buried plus unburied).

I also did this with terms that are widely considered to be spam-heavy, as that accusation has been leveled at Ron Paul supporters on Digg and elsewhere.

Pages of stories
Search Unburied Total
“Ron Paul” 141 558
“Rudy Giuliani” 90 130
“Mitt Romney” 76 88
“Hillary Clinton” 272 321
“Barack Obama” 163 189
“John McCain” 1053 1189
…
iPod 1654 1986
“Britney Spears” 325 388
“Paris Hilton” 599 693
porn 334 407

In other words, a total of 558 pages of stories were submitted (maybe 6000 stories) about Ron Paul. 141 pages of stories (maybe 1500) have not been buried. My rough estimate is that 3/4 (75%) of the Ron Paul stories have been buried.

For the other candidates there is a total of 1654 pages of stories unburied, out of a total of 1917 pages. Only 13% of stories about other candidates have been buried. The spam-heavy control topics had 16% of stories buried.

Article Link: http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Find-Freedom.htm?At=021476

Please see what you can do to curb this trend. Our suggestion would be to add a “Who Buried This Story” tab, or better yet: eliminate burying altogether.

Whatever happened to “Change the channel if you don’t like what’s on”? Isn’t burying a story more like jamming the radio station’s frequency?

marc