http://www.jedreport.com/2008/08/mccains-campaig.htmlMcCain's Campaign of Silence
Apparently I'm not alone in having content quashed by McCain's bury brigade at digg. The basic idea of McCain's bury brigade is to hide from view negative stories about McCain on digg, the web's most popular community-moderated site for sharing news and other information.
A perfect recent example of a video getting buried is my recent "What Happened?" video about McCain's curious blanking out. It received hundreds of diggs on the day it was posted, yet never made it to the front page of digg -- because McCain's censors quashed the story.
It's hard to know exactly how McCain's bury brigade operates because digg is not transparent. But as the post at Political Irony makes clear, there is an organized effort to squelch discussion of topics which do not flatter McCain.
This is a thoroughly dishonorable tactic -- especially given the negative tone of his campaign.
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http://politicalirony.com/2008/08/07/mccains-frequent-liar-program/McCain’s Frequent Liar Program
It isn’t often that irony hits this close to home, but the revelations in the Washington Post that McCain’s campaign is giving out prizes to people who spam political blogs explains some strange things that have been happening to PoliticalIrony.com over the last month.
You can see it for yourself, on McCain’s official site. They even give you handy talking points and tell you which blogs you should spam, conveniently dividing them into Liberal, Conservative, Moderate, and Other. Heck, you don’t even have to think to participate! For each verified comment you post, you get “points” that can be redeemed for prizes, much like a frequent flier or frequent buyer program.
It isn’t that I get much spam — I guess my site isn’t big enough to warrant being on the robo-list that tells the ditto-heads which blogs to inundate with irrelevant drivel. The bigger thing I have noticed is that suddenly (on July 20th to be exact) anti-McCain stories from Political Irony that were submitted to news aggregators like Digg, Reddit, and others were getting immediately voted down. Suppressed, if you will.
The Washington Post article doesn’t talk about this tactic, but it makes sense. Voting down good news about your opponents or bad news about yourself is much easier than getting people to actually write things. Besides, as the WaPo article points out, Astroturf campaigning (making things appear to be grass roots when they aren’t) can fail because “germaneness” is an issue. People who post random talking points to blogs for “points” are often just ignored. But if McCain supporters are suddenly crawling over blogs and aggregators looking for posts to comment on, of course they are going to be voting down posts they don’t like.
It works like this. When a story on Political Irony (or other site) gets submitted to a news aggregator like Digg, people vote it up or down. Only stories that get enough votes appear on the front page and get lots of viewers. These sites have a queue of new stories, but most people don’t look at the new stories, they only look at the front page. So a very small number of people can exercise quite a bit of control over what makes it to the front page, especially if they are “motivated” enough. And since many people on the Internet depend on aggregators to tell them what’s interesting, they will never see these censored stories.
more...
http://politicalirony.com/2008/08/07/mccains-frequent-liar-program/
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