Censorship Issues Continue for Digg

It’s been almost two weeks since the latest Digg fiacso. Quick review: stories with HD-DVD encryption codes being censored, Diggers strike back by creating, posting and digging new stories with the codes, Digg’s Kevin Rose conceded.

However, it appears that Digg’s censorship issues are far from over. Rising stories are disappearing after being buried not by the community of Diggers, but by Digg employees (or, possibly, a specific algorithm targeting sites from specific URLs or types of sites). Neil Patel and Andy Hagans have seen this happening to stories that they’ve followed, as have others.

How do they know these stories aren’t being buried by the Digg community? Neil points to a URL that displays the last 10,000 buries. He also provides an archived copy of the last 10,000 buries before a Pronet story disappeared. The Pronet story appears nowhere in the last 10,000 buries. Stefan Juhl apparently reported to Neil the last referrer to one of his stories before it was buried was “crawl3.digg.internal.”

I like Andy Hagans’s balanced attitude, in spite of the fact that he’s had this happen to him twice in the last day:

Now, let me state for the record, Digg is a privately owned business, and if they want to manually pull stories and not own up to it, that’s well within their rights. (Though I would argue, it is bad for business.) I also don’t have a “right” to be on their homepage (even if the users like the stuff I submit). This is business. I evolve and move on.

I also however want to state for the record: it appears from the evidence that the Digg staff are big fat hairy liars.

Personally, I think this was happening long before the HD-DVD controversy, but it does appear as though there is better evidence to substantiate the most recent claims—and it may well be affecting more vocal people now.

I also get the feeling that this is the kind of censorship that Digg users want, or will at least support. How long will it take for the first Digger to stumble over here and extol the virtues of Digg’s staff for protecting users from SEOs’ nefarious linkbaiting schemes?