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Objectivity on Digg
Digg has bothered me for quite a while. It is a good source for news as I do not have to scour the web for interesting stories. However, if you are looking for objectivity you will have to look somewhere else.
This is probably not a problem for those who only visit very specific Digg sections like Technology/Apple you or Gaming/XBox. You know what you are getting into. Those sections have fanboy written all around them. I don’t think that anyone reading the news posted there have any objectivity expectations whatsoever.
On the other hand, if you enter a more general section such as World & Business/US Elections 2008 you may think that all positions will be equally (or at least proportionally) represented. If you think so, you may be in for a big disappointment.
Today I tried to submit a story published on the Yahoo front page about how Hillary Clinton was now leading the polls among Democrats. I don’t really want Clinton to be elected President but I wanted that particular news to get posted on Digg since Obama suporters have clearly hijacked that section of the site (previously Ron Paul supporters had done the same on the Republican side). I was just trying to get some balance into Digg because I naively though that the problem was that only positive news for Obama were being published. I was wrong, dead wrong.
It turns out that the news had already been submitted by someone else. That should have made me happy, right? That is what I wanted, a positive note for Clinton in an ocean of notes favoring Obama, providing some well needed balance in my quest for objectivity. Well, let’s say that I was deeply disappointed (this is probably the understatement of the year). The person who actually submitted the story first is obviously an Obama supporter. Instead of titling the story “Clinton leads the polls” or something similar based on the actual content of the article, he decided to name it “The Media Is Already Gearing Up To Justify Clinton Winning”. With such an absurd title it is likely that most Digg readers will never read the actual note, which probably was the intent of this person from the beginning.
Since the same article cannot be submitted twice, it is easy to play the system. A partial solution would be to have Digg automatically use the original article title. However, this is hard to implement from a technical perspective. The problem here is that as long as some of those who submit stories are more interested in publishing their point of view than in hearing all the facts, a site like Digg will never become a trusted news source. While traditional media has its own share of flaws, it still beats hands down unmoderated web sites. That is why I do not see established newspapers going down anytime soon.