Who's Gaming Digg? The Right-Wing Digg Rigging Wigout

Improbably-named political journalist Ole Ole Olson broke a kind of scandalous story on Alternet last week. It appears that a gang of conservatives calling themselves the DiggPatriots had been colluding for over a year on Yahoo! Groups to game the rankings on popular social media site Digg. This they achieved by systematically "burying" targeted liberal publications and stories and uprating conservative ones in order to limit the readership and perceived popularity of liberal stories, to inflate the readership and popularity of conservative ones. It's against the Digg terms of service to collude in the first place, but Olson claims he's also documented the DiggPatriots weaseling around their multiple individual "lifetime" bans from Digg by securing new IPs and aliases, using multiple accounts simultaneously, lying about being African-American in order to get some liberal writer or other banned from Digg, and so on.

The moment Olson's story broke, the DiggPatriots Yahoo! group was deleted. However, Mr. Olson claims to have months and months' worth of archives of the DiggPatriots message board, which promise hours of ghastly entertainment when they are posted.

Here is a sample from the DiggPatriots message board, as reported by Olson:

"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)

I am sorry but how many kinds of dumb can you pack into one statement, by golly? If there were the slightest chance of persuading liberals to "change their ways and become conservatives"-I know, it's happened now and again-the example hereby set isn't going to help any. Also: how can you be shouting about "democracy" all the time, and then go around actively manipulating the crowd? And calling it patriotism? And how… gah whatever, they are so dumb.)

I've got two questions about this incident. First, if the DiggPatriots succeeded in gaming the rankings for a whole year undetected, we can assume that all sorts of other groups are doing so too, still undetected, right? And secondly: if Digg and other social media sites are indeed being gamed by various groups, what effect does this have, exactly?

None of this would be such a big deal, except for two things.

One is that Digg's audience is so super-giantly large. According to the Guardian Digg had 7.6 million unique visitors in June alone this year. Given that thirteen of the top fifty spots on Alexa are held by Google, because they break out each nation's Google site on its own, Digg is well within the top hundred of the world's websites. A place on Digg's front page guarantees thousands upon thousands of readers for the lucky author of a popular piece.

The other big-deal thing is that a space on the the Digg front page confers a certain crowdsourced stamp of approval: the front page results appear to have been generated by non-colluding individuals with diverse aims and information, like a wonderful snapshot of the hive mind.

James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds is instructive here. Social media sites like Digg rely tangentially on the "wisdom of crowds" principle; if a lot of different people find something engaging or interesting, there's a reasonable chance you will, too. This is a little bit like the jellybean-counting phenomenon, or like Rotten Tomatoes movie ratings.

There's a fractal aspect of social networking sites that adds a huge wrinkle, though, as Surowiecki describes. Once we believe that a lot of disparate individuals hold some opinion, by reading a poll or a review, or noting a high Digg ranking, that colors our perception of the facts, and thereby alters our opinions. For example, if you show the jellybean-estimator everyone else's guesses before he makes his own, the "wisdom" disappears. Or you can game the jellybean results, say by concealing a hollow globe amongst the jellybeans (which is kind of what the DiggPatriots were doing,) or by putting a label on the jellybean jar that says "1000 jellybeans." It's very easy to skew the results of such experiments.

The real wisdom of crowds works only in certain circumstances, as Surowiecki notes:

Under what circumstances is the crowd smarter?

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

And what circumstances can lead the crowd to make less-than-stellar decisions?

Essentially, any time most of the people in a group are biased in the same direction, it's probably not going to make good decisions. So when diverse opinions are either frozen out or squelched when they're voiced, groups tend to be dumb. And when people start paying too much attention to what others in the group think, that usually spells disaster, too. For instance, that's how we get stock-market bubbles, which are a classic example of group stupidity: instead of worrying about how much a company is really worth, investors start worrying about how much other people will think the company is worth. The paradox of the wisdom of crowds is that the best group decisions come from lots of independent individual decisions.

So many arguments come down to "most people believe …" and "the will of the people," even in countries governed by autocrats; hence the importance of polls and the attention they are always given. Hence the tacit, almost subconscious trust we put in sites like Digg.

The DiggPatriots story demonstrates that, because it benefits certain individuals to collude in order to game the results, the impression of crowdsourced authenticity on Digg is false. But how false, really, we can't know. But efforts like these might partly explain why many of us are forever wondering, who ARE all these climate-change deniers, these Tea Partiers, these fans of Sarah Palin? Maybe there really aren't so many of them as all that.

It seems clear that finding hidden disinformation is of the utmost importance; but even if we can't eliminate disinformation entirely, we should at least know that there's a chance it's already there. Consequently, it's worth trying to understand the nature and purposes of such collusion as we know to have occurred.

It was a mistake though for Mr. Olson to use the word "censorship" to describe the activities of the Digg Patriots. Censorship suggests an abuse of power, but the DiggPatriots haven't got any power. What they've got is the will to be dishonest. It's not censorship; it's nowhere near that dignified. It's plain cheating, sinc ethere are rules.

The activities of the Digg Patriots far more closely resemble these things:

Publishing photos of a huge crowd at your rally, only they weren't taken at your rally and you know it.

Sending salaried party operatives to pretend to be concerned residents of Florida and stage a riot.

Publishing photographs of calm lovely Istanbul that you claim to have taken yourself in Baghdad.

Heavily doctoring a video by adding in unrelated footage of yourself dressed as a cartoon pimp in order to discredit an organization dedicated to helping the poor.

Editing a video in which a black woman speaks in favor of racial harmony and understanding to make it look as if she's saying the opposite.

All of which are cheating things that right-wing activists have done in a fraudulent attempt to make their numbers look bigger, their adherents more committed, their opponents less trustworthy, and their policy positions more popular, wise and/or secure.

Lest it be supposed that I favor the left: I do. One of the main reasons for that is that there are far fewer such incidents to report from the contemporary left. I regret that it has to be said, and I wish more on the right were smart and principled like David Gergen and Dwight D. Eisenhower and Colin Powell. I do not believe that any of those guys would cheat, and I would love it if there more like them. Note to Republicans: if you can run some guys who are as smart and principled as David Gergen, I, a liberal, might even vote for them.

However, there is a trend on the American right of behaving in a manner that indicates they believe it is better to cheat than lose. That's not so surprising, really. Among people who think that Ayn Rand is a visionary, and even a novelist, it is not just okay but practically obligatory to believe that anything goes. The ends justify the means. You just grab! Greed is good! Until they change their ways and actively state that they have given up cheating because it is contemptible and wrong, then, we can assume we will be seeing more of the same (to clarify, I don't demand that the DiggPatriots become liberals, only that they stop cheating.)

The "popular news" Digg is showing us is already polluted by nonindependent judgment, presumably of many different kinds; in response to last week's revelations, new suspicions are already being aired, like this post about the possible burying of Linux-related stories. There's lesser gaming left and right-lots of websites hire "Digg consultants." You can hire Digg Front for a month to get your story on the front page for $495-and if they don't get you there, they'll do it again next month for free.

You could say all this is like the stock market, which has already been gamed all to hell with all sorts of insider trading and self-serving shenanigans before you ever get near it. Maybe you still want to have a flutter, and see what's doing in such places. But you should do so in the full, clear knowledge that the information we get is liable to be tainted in all manner of ways.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

Photo from Flickr by Paul McGuire.