Extremist group tries to game Digg
blogs.alternet.org
blogs.alternet.org
I don't know whether to thank you or not. :)
They should probably have asked a conservative. It's hard to tell whether these folks were submitting quality stories with a different slant, or were actively submitting crap. Obviously it's hard to trust the views of a site that says:
There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya.
And follows that up with the unironic:
They just love to hate.
Fortunately, this article makes it easier for voting sites to detect cabals and manipulators by seeing which accounts vote in tandem. That might lead to false positives, but that may not be so bad--if only a tiny minority cares very strongly about a single story, I don't have to care whether or not they're coordinating their votes. Either way, it's likely to be of less interest to the average reader.
If I may quote from the article quoting the conspiracy's users about the submissions of 'these folks'
> "If any of the usual suspects subbed a story claiming “sky blue/water wet,” I’d BURY IT without question. I’ve been on digg for almost 4 years… > -JeremiahLaments (account says Joined Digg on 21Aug2009)"
> "I personally vote for a complete blackout on lib subs: Bury every comment (including the conservatives “helping” to pop the story). No up-votes (no matter how much you agree). > -asami21"
> "Whether I agree with Bjornski, Anamaly100, PhilPerspective, Novenator, JanineWallace, UncaJoe, & a couple others I can’t think of right now, I bury `em anyway. ACTUALLY each of them has been “dead-on, balls-accurate” (an industry term) at least once in the past week or so, and it sort-of pains me to be dishonest by burying them anyway, but then I remember . . . I’m not up for re-election! > -BentheDog"
To someone who disagrees with all of it, Codevilla is just Glenn Beck at greater length. Which is why the author should have asked a conservative if the content that crew posted was high-quality or not.
Regarding "someone should have asked a conservative", that just goes to show how deeply the "we'll just believe our own facts, thank you" is embedded in the conservative movement. http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page. Not that liberals are always right or anything, but you can ask 10 liberals and get 20 answers, or you can ask 10 conservatives and get 1 answer.
I don't think the writer of the original story is a good source for judging the quality of content written from a conservative perspective, due to his/her existing views.
I would bet that most conservatives disagree with most of what is written in the two examples I gave, so I doubt that conservatism is an intellectual monolith. Within the conservative movement, there's plenty of lively debate; when a traditionalist Souther Agrarian can claim to share the same party as a hedonistic libertarian psychonaut, it's unlikely for there to be "1 answer."
Most people here keep extremism out here anyway. Emotional arguments don't succeed to gain traction, you have to be factual and nuanced to gain respect here, and as far as I see blind extremism doesn't get that far.
On Reddit the comparison used to be Digg. (I left three years ago, so I don't know what happened in the mean time.)
If you have something to say, say it. Reddit's probably irrelevant, and for the record, for any population, there's a lot of people smarter than you and me. Particularly if you and I are engaging in lazy categorization.
After all, this whole discussion is attached to a story about how a group of people took the time, because of their political motivations, to attempt to "attack" another group of people on a web site. Seems like pretty lame behavior to me.
I'm just as guilty as the next person of saying something rude on HN every now and then, but for the most part I and I suspect most others do our best to make substantive contributions to the discussions here.
IRL, that is generally what I like about Europeans (or at least my impression of them) - they have more mild beliefs. A lot of Americans seem to have very strong predetermined beliefs.
Politics isn't just about elections. It's the science of influencing people. That definition doesn't exclude unethical means.
There are a lot of lies and distortion thrown around in political ads through regulated media outlets. Obviously the potential for abuse on the net is much greater, and cheaper too...
Anybody can bias what's out there. Sometimes it'll happen directly, sometime people are paid to do it. It reminds me of the propositions that get on the ballot in California. Some interests used paid signature gatherers (in some cases using criminals to do the work) to get something on the ballot, then follow up with a heavily funded misleading ad campaign.
Here's an example of even a relatively small company abusing what appeared to be posts from average people:
http://thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belkins-d... [thedailybackground.com]
http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/21/flash-second-hi... [thedailybackground.com]
http://i.gizmodo.com/5134652/belkin-employee-sheds-light-on-... [gizmodo.com]
Tangentially, I think it would be awesome to get a data-dump of all voting records for, say, 2009, of HN.
Something that shows every story and comment (with parent/child relationship) and timestamped voting records.
Assign a random id to every account that actually voted to protect privacy and preclude any chilling effect on future votes.
That would be fun to mine.
Or, perhaps, the feeling that conservative content is underrepresented is because of something more benign -- maybe more liberals visit Digg than conservatives?
That's just because their better at it than the Cons. Cue music from the Twilight Zone....
Talking about how a conservative group briefly has the upper hand is like observing which pig has briefly risen to the top of the muck pile. Don't worry, I'm sure counter-conservatives will be rallying behind this story to overpower them in another iteration of the endlessly-boring cycle and I look forward to reading about how it singlehandedly proves liberalism is a cabalistic conspiracy on a wide collection of right-leaning sites run by the sort of people who still think Digg votes matter.
I think this would be the most interesting problem a social media site would have to solve once it got traction.
And that this whole right-wing conspiracy might amount to a bunch of people pumping up their egos while basically spinning their wheels?
Just sayin'...
In fact Digg and a couple of other technologies taught me the foolishness of "power to the people". You don't want to democratize every site on the internet. You want to allow a million flowers to bloom, everyone to have their say but in their own space that they control. This produces a much healthier environment. It pisses off some people that their soapbox doesn't grow as large as they believe it should by virtue of their obvious innate greatness, but I've come to see this as a feature, not a bug.
The error of this thinking was the downfall of Digg, and for another example, Third Voice. Also, numerous blog owners initially fell for the idea that removing comments from their site is "censorship" on par with how evil it is when governments do it, and this idea is still current, even though it's nothing more than a recipe for getting destroyed by trolls after a certain critical mass is obtained. Like I said, the right answer is something else entirely. It's a recurring cycle on the Internet; somebody decides power-to-the-people is the way to go, the problems become manifest, the community takes action to contain the damage or simply flames out entirely, and some idealistic group of people get pissed off, declare that the people are now powerless and it's time for power to the people, starting the cycle over again. I've watched at least 3 iterations of this over the past 10 years. We're due for another "power to the people" explosion which right now is most likely to manifest in the distributed-Facebook community.
I hope they can figure out a way to solve this sort of thing going forward. And I'm curious if their choice of either digg/bury instead of upvote/downvote makes it easier to game. I believe it does, as these folks haven't been able to do the same with reddit. I'm not sure, but I believe a story is gone once it gets a certain number of "buries" whereas on reddit a story with a lot of downvotes can be easily resurrected by upvotes. (though I could be wrong about this?)
Perhaps another reason reddit isn't as susceptible is that it allows for user-created subreddits where like-minded folks can form such hives.
Also, there's still a difference between something that happens there and what the Digg Patriots are doing in that they are conspiring to game the system. There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.
Edit: I think we see the natural split of progressive v. libertarian on reddit, and both parties are represented very well. Perhaps there's not a neo-conservative/fox news voice, but I would not be quick to blame that on some sort of conspiracy as much as I would on the difficulty one has reasoning with these sorts of extremists. They are not there to engage in dialog as much as they are there to poison it.
As far as we know.
Too bad I couldn't have caught it sometime between the swing from Liberal Hivemind to Conservative Cabal, it might have been worth reading.
Actually... I just realized that both sides tend to "prove" their points with lots of ad hominem. It's just that the ad hominem coming from liberals tends to be a touch better spelled; I think the smart conservatives quickly learn to keep their heads down, so only the dumb ones try to step out into the shit-storm.
Obama: "I'm trying to fix healthcare" Republicans: "He's trying to kill your grandmother"
Washington Post: "Obama, Republicans disagree over whether healthcare plan will mandate euthanasia"
Influencing people is power. Why do you think the diversity in ownership of U.S. broadcasters has become so eroded? There's more to it than lack of competition.
I see people around me fighting over parking spaces. I see people holding conferences on how to fight over parking spaces (that guy is muscling in!). I see people do the same for roughly every damn topic in this world, and sometimes it gets really messy. Why?
What's in it for them?
Parking spaces? Because they want to park and people can be intimidated by violence into giving up a preferential space.
So one possible explanation is that some of these people feel frustrated and angry because for whatever reason, they're not able to voice their own political opinions in real life, so they get a rush from the power of denying random people on the internet that same freedom.
The city of San Luis Obispo (known as being the first for banning smoking in public places and one of the first to have curbside recycling) came up with 72 hour abandonment. There are no 72 hour parking signs. But go on vacation, away to visit family, carpool or use your bike instead of driving, bed in bed with the flu for days... and a car left is in violation. They mark a tire and the street with chalk and leave a little "courtesy notice" under a windshield wiper and then at three days tow. Beside the high towing fees, and a substantial impound release fee, there is also a citation for abandonment ($280). Of course the towing contractors charge a hefty per day storage fee. They (the city police and parking agency) may reduce/rename the abandonment citation considering picking up the car from the towing yard to be "no intent to abandon". Of course some strapped for cash may not be able to get a car right away, and end up losing a vehicle due to the high ransom at the towing yard. The pirates may extract a lot of money for cargo ships, but on a personal level what the City of San Luis Obispo does to people hits harder as a percentage.
Note that this practice happens even in from of ones own home, even if there is no parking shortage. Neighbors that don't get along use it as a way to harass each other, and in some places people call in complaints to tr and get parking spaces. As a college town, there are many places were units have no off-road parking, or insufficient off road parking. The city makes money on this, as do the towing contractors. They see to meet the public notice requirements without people noticing... I know of an employee who has bought dozens of vehicles at auction for the minimum bid (towing/storage fees).
There's dirty business at every level it seems.
i went to school in San Luis. i know two people who left their cars parked on the street after finding out that fixing the car would cost more than the car itself.
the first two years i was in San Luis, i lived at a place that charged for parking. i would park my car on the street and leave it there for weeks until i needed to go visit my folks in the central valley. i did not have the problem you are describing even when i left the car unmoved for 3 weeks at a time.
Although the state vehicle code section cited in their paperwork mentions the court, the actual process of dealing with SLOPD or the parking people DENIES access to the court. Appeals go to the same people that issued the towing order.
Except for a home, a car is the largest investment that great many Americans make. There's notice to ones' mailbox before towing. A person that's ill or otherwise not using a car for legitimate reasons may very well not see a notice on the car. The fine is more than that for parking in a handicapped zone or for any other parking violation. They're unwilling to work with the community to solve problems. For instance I once had someone park across my driveway which is less obvious than most (especially at night) and I called the PD asking if they could help me by contacting the neighbor (I didn't know which apartment he was in) so he could move his car. It wasn't an immediate problem. They said sure. But when an officer showed up, he refused to go to the neighbor and instead had the car towed. They didn't make me happy, and I'm sure they didn't make the owner of the car happy. The solution was worse than the problem.
If they had 72 hour parking signs up and simply issued tickets with the right to go to court, it'd all be fair. But to put someone through some very expensive grief without due process is just wrong. Also, as you noted, the enforcement is spotty. It's often selective enforcement. It may not be bias on the part of an officer, but the complaint process is open to bias too. Someone of lower income with an older car is more likely to be targeted simply because a neighbor doesn't like seeing an older car, or some assume an older car isn't operational.
San Luis has many people that are very environmentally conscious. Many ride bikes, walk, take a bus or car pool. Some students rarely drive except to see family or buy food. Being parked for a period is not abandonment, and the state code used here has no time limit. The city is misapplying the law selectively. It is being applied to some people that have no intention of abandoning their vehicles. There is no opportunity to appeal towing/impound fees at all and only improper means are available (not to a court) to appeal the citation that follows.
Additionally, towing is overkill when in a residential zone. Extended parking downtown (in an area typically metered) reduces availability of parking in a saturated area. But in a residential area, a car that's parked continuously for a couple of weeks versus one that's used a few times during the day has no difference in impact because it's overnight (when essentially everyone is sleeping) that parking is closest to saturation. Someone towed and subjected to that cost and the impound release fee when it is not an abandoned car will most likely bring it right back to the same area it was towed from. So what's the point of towing?
Beyond simply being parked, there should be some pretty good additional reason to believe a car is intentionally abandoned. Not currently registered, owner failed to give valid address, flat tires... Issue a ticket with right to appeal, send certified mail to registered address... if the car is by the registered address maybe even knock on a door. The city employees and PD get huge salaries. Perhaps in the things they do they need policies modified to solve problems with the least possible harm. The refusal to knock on a neighbors door when he parked across my driveway by accident makes it clear just how unwilling to help they can be.
You never got cited. If you'd done something (could be trivial - rude when a party gets a noise complaint) they could throw the book at you for other things. Just laws don't make ordinary citizens into criminals that can be harassed and emotionally / financially damaged with no appeal. (and I said, a neighbor upset with you could easily have caused the same grief, it is often arbitrary enforcement where there is no actual problem)
They also have a 72h rule but it is not enforced (they state this) unless you don't clean the snow off your car after a big snow fall. Surprisingly reasonable of them...
Before Digg went to their new format, I made a bot that upvoted or downvoted stories in C# in just a couple hours. I haven't dug around their new format yet, but I imagine it is equally easy to game too...
They must hate computers too
Most of the conspiracy theory nuts I know (I know a couple) are just kids who something big to happen, and so they make up a conspiracy so that they can be part of it.
Since the moderation system isn't for down-rating posts that one disagrees with, the system get still get flooded with well-tempered deliberate misinformation.
Would MS pay people to post "I tried for days to get my Linux install to work right, but the buggy drivers made my screen flicker so much my dog had a seizure and died. I'm sticking with Windows forever!"? Fun for moderators...
Also not sure I'd call this an extremist group. Ideological group perhaps, but extremist? Sure some of the members cited were bad apples (stalking, etc.), but yeah this is pure ideological polemics. When you have the the majority of mainstream media shilling for the left, one can't really blame the right for trying to regain some ground.
"The anti-Semitic web site “Jew Watch” appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew,” prompting some Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the defamatory site from the top of its listings. Google refused."
http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007/2007-02/200702-BrinF...
Admittedly I might be wrong as I don't live in that country, but American media and politics seems to consist of the right and the further right.
E.g. the state gives lots of support for home ownership, including government sponsored mortgage guarantees. Or the power of all those crazy unions. Nominally more social-democratic Germany or Scandinavia look tame by comparison on those aspects.
Both of which has bankrupted many states..and the auto industry (union power).
Union membership as percent of workforce in: Sweden: 78.0% (2003) United States: 12.0% (2006)
I don't think you have proper appreciation of the historical power of the unions in Swedish politics. In comparison, the U.S. unions are a fringe.
Anyway, just retract my claim about Sweden. I don't know nearly enough about it.
But I know that in Germany unions are in general quite business friendly, and not nearly as inflexible and insisting on entitlement as, say, the UAW was portrayed in what I read.
Neither a Democrat nor Republican, but find the ongoing pretense by many otherwise brilliant people that the dominant US media isn't left biased to be an incredibly silly rationalization.
The only issues where I'd say the news media is genuinely more liberal than the average American is gun control, and I'd say that has more to do with the fact that just about every person in the news media lives and/or works in a major City where gun violence is a problem. Considering gun control hasn't been a major platform issue of the Democratic party since the mid 90's, and is of little interest to the modern progressive/liberal movement (they are far more concerned with social and economic matters), it's hardly fair to classify them as across-the-board liberals.
It would be an interesting technology project or site. Do a sentiment analysis of major media sources. Search for how often a particular phrase is used. e.g.
Immigration: "Illegal Alien" or "Undocumented Worker"
Abortion: "Pro-Life" or "Anti-Abortion"
Something that could update in real time. It is unavoidable that every news site will have some slant, but an objective number based on rational criteria would be a good tool ala the nutrition facts labels on food packages.
In any event, I'm not sure it means much: most news organizations operate out of major cities, and major cities tend to have more liberal populations. If it was economically feasible to start a world-class news organization in a rural part of the Bible-belt, things might be different, but apparently it is not.
And here:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/05/is_leftleaning_google...
1) Blogs are not inherently "news". Ergo, they should not always be put into a news feed.
2) The blogs in question were removed because of objectionable content. Which, after reading a couple of articles on one of the sites mentioned, seems totally reasonable. The reason it's OK to remove these from the Google News feed is because it's not news. It's a few paranoid people talking about how dangerous RADICAL ISLAM is.
This is not a "liberal bias". This is an attempt to have a news feed that contains news. Not libel. Not hate speech.
Here is something I just found on the google news feed: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20012891-10391698.html
This isn't news either, yet it's still there
"The blogs in question were removed because of objectionable content. Which, after reading a couple of articles on one of the sites mentioned, seems totally reasonable. The reason it's OK to remove these from the Google News feed is because it's not news. It's a few paranoid people talking about how dangerous RADICAL ISLAM is."
I find this article filled with just as much propaganda as an article about radical Islam, yet Google news still displays it (it's interesting how left-leaning opinion pieces are fine):
http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2010/08/05/opinion/doc4c5...
With everything that has happened in the world, I don't see how you can pass off "the dangers of radical islam" as something small in the minds of paranoid people.
"This is not a "liberal bias". This is an attempt to have a news feed that contains news. Not libel. Not hate speech."
What you call "hate speech" and "libel" are just opinions. I find that word thrown around with ease by the left to vilify and silence opposing opinions.
If the info in the above articles are all lies, why does it matter if people read them? Won't they eventually find out?
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/ "Jesse Norton aka Younes Abdullah, How Did Your Conference Go At RM? You Know, The One With Convicted Terrorist Omar The Goat Humping Bakri Muhammed?"
http://www.michnews.com/Alan_Caruba/ac080410.shtml "This is why a mosque within steps of Ground Zero is so inherently wrong. It says that the intended victims of Islamic domination are simply too blind to envision their fate, too fearful to confront evil, to ready to get on the next train to Auschwitz."
Seriously?
This was an okay article and an opinion on where our debt comes from. I was merely pointing out the blogs and opinion pieces do get into google news.
As for the links you just posted: I may not agree with any of the content, but they are also just opinions (and not much worse than the links I posted)
The reason you don't want them posted is because you don't agree with them politically, which goes against the freedom of speech.
EDIT: I should say that I am interested in this inasmuch as it relates to Google censoring news. Having not found any evidence of censorship and having found evidence of actively selecting only quality content, my opinion is that they were right to exclude the blogs listed and it has nothing to do with whatever political beliefs I might hold.
No, the reason I think they were excluded from Google was because of examples like I posted. "Goat humping" has no place in a news feed. Likewise, comparing Islam to Nazi germany is not only in bad taste, it makes almost no sense. Framing this as an ideological debate when it is one of quality of information is nonsensical.
As to your last point, I think it's extremely important that both sides of this ridiculous debate get to talk to one another. Hopefully, if everyone is willing, we'll be able to work together and build a nation together that is tolerant of informed opinion and intolerant of those whose only goal is to inflame, incite and misinform.