An interesting story came to light a few days ago. Presumably you are aware of the social news site Digg. Well, it seems that a group of conservative members of the site conspired (apparently for months if not years) to drive its member-voted top content towards the right end of the political spectrum. By utilizing multiple accounts (against Digg’s terms of use) and by communicating with each other outside the community (through an invitation-only Yahoo group called the Digg Patriots), this group was massively successful in voting up news items that furthered their conservative agenda, and burying content that conflicted with it. They were also successful in provoking more liberal members of the site to the point where those members became belligerent and insulting enough to be banned from the site.
Now shills and plants were around for a long time before social networking, and some would argue that this group did nothing wrong. After all, Digg is all about crowdsourcing the top news stories (ok, not just news, but whatever bright and shiny web content that attracts the attention of the community). But this is an interesting phenomenon: These (apparently) weren’t paid actors intent on driving people to do more business with a company (or do less with a competitor); this was a group that basically took it upon themselves to hijack a community to further their political agenda. Why did they pick Digg? One would assume because of Digg’s popularity: according to a 2009 study by Social Computing Journal, it’s the #9 top social networking site. After all, why hijack a site hardly anyone looks at? For social networking it seems, success is a two edged sword: A large group of sufficiently motivated users might make your social networking site an incredible success, but such a group might also choose to bend or break it to suit their agenda. And sadly, the more successful your social networking site the more likely it is that it will attract this type of activity.
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