Proof Digg's Bury Feature Abused To Suppress Controversial Content

Chris
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Information Libertation

Programmer hacks Digg, gets bury list for a few hours: Bury list is full of shills burying highly significant content

A programmer found a bug at Digg which allowed him to view the Bury feed at Digg. He posted the list on his website and it is eye opening, to say the least.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE LIST

Notice how there are tons of obvious shills burying our recent explosive WTC 7 articles as well as many other articles of extreme significance. It's shocking to read the list and see how much significant, documented, and extremely popular content is being buried for obvious ideological reasons. This is completely undemocratic abuse of the Digg system and is proof positive the Bury feature is being abused to suppress content by vindictive Anti-Diggers.

From Pronet Advertising:

We've heard about a purported 'Bury Brigade' on Digg time and again, with sketchy pieces of evidence here and there but no concrete proof. Until now....

While that system is supposed to be used to remove superfluous or irrelevant content from Digg, the mechanism is often abused to remove useful and insightful content by malicious users for self-serving and vindictive reasons. My observations are based on data collected by David using a mechanism that he tried to explain to me via email. You can get this data by using the Digg Spy JSON Array:

...You can see which user did the burying, on what story, and on what basis. By looking at just some of the data, you can get quite conclusive hard evidence that not only does the bury brigade exist, but it is hard at work burying any content that doesn't suit its ideology.

buries-raw-data.html
buries-top-users-with-reasons.html
buries-top-stories-with-reasons.html
buries-top-users.html
buries-top-stories.html

Digg's Bury feature is supposed to be used to bury "stories with bad links, off-topic content, or duplicate entries" in order to remove "spam out of the system." Unfortunately, as many have experienced, the Bury feature is frequently used to suppress content based off ideology. Please encourage Digg to either fix it (perhaps make it similar to Reddit's down voting) or remove it all together.

Email Digg here and request they please fix the Bury feature.