Conservative Banned by Digg

by Sean Hackbarth

If new, social media will be the way many people find their news then conservatives need to use them to connect to fellow conservatives and promote conservative stories. Digg is the big player in the social news space. Gop3.com’s Brandon Henak urged his readers to start using Digg. Yesterday, Digg banned his account “due to misuse.” Read his tutorial to see if he did anything to “game” Digg. Getting conservative stories on Digg doesn’t guarantee others will vote for them. He didn’t organize a voting ring to manipulate votes. Brandon just said his readers could “digg all the interesting news you see with the knowledge that you are promoting oft ignored conservative news and opinions to millions who may never have seen it.” I don’t see anything wrong and think it was stupid of the company to turn off him, his readers, and possibly a lot of conservatives.

“Banned By Digg for Aiding and Abetting the Conservative Voice”

UPDATE: This post is on Digg. So if you want others to read about it vote.

UPDATE: The story’s over. Gop3.com is out of Digg purgatory. A flaw in Digg’s model is the blind acceptance of members’ opinions that a story is “spam.” From the e-mail from Digg tech support it seems they take a ban-first-ask-questions-later approach. That allows political enemies to ban stories without consequence. Digg will have to address that. Brandon Henak has more. Eric Odom offers this on the importance of Digg being a place for a whole host of ideas:

As mentioned above, I have no problem with Liberal Diggers working together to push stories to the front page, but when they start working together to keep others from the front page then I think the idea of it being a free place to submit news and stories for ANYONE kind of goes out the window.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 7:42 am and is filed under Tech. You can trackback from your own site.

12 Responses to “Conservative Banned by Digg”

Here is one way to get this on Digg so others can see:
http://digg.com/politics/Conservative_Banned_by_Digg

Posted by Brandon Henak on February 21st, 2007

I’ve lost count of the number of conservative blogs who either don’t have comments or secretly scrub their comments to erase liberal commentators. Sorry, right-wing-nutoverse, time for a bit of your own medicine. And it looks like they made an exception for Sean, who has the bravest comment policy I’ve ever seen at a conservative blog. Why, he’s almost liberal in terms of who he lets post here.

Posted by Chet on February 21st, 2007

[…] The Management Digg’s management has been known to play along with this bias by banning Conservative members for less than valid reasons. The most recent example of this is the banning of Conservative Digger, Brandon Henak of GOP3.com. […]

Posted by Eric Odom - » Is this proof that Digg is bias against Conservatives? on February 21st, 2007

Digg is where I learned the liberal greeting DIAF or die in a fire.

Diggers don’t see their liberal/anarcho/juvenile bias any more than a fish sees water.

Posted by Fred on February 21st, 2007

“Die in a fire” isn’t a “liberal greeting”, it’s a phrase video game playing kids are using. It has nothing to do with liberals.

Posted by Chet on February 21st, 2007

Whatever happened to “All your bases belong to us?”

Posted by Sean Hackbarth on February 21st, 2007

So Chet, it sounds like you disapprove of conservative blogs that don’t allow comments or delete comments they don’t like, but it’s okay with you when liberals do it to conservatives because they are getting a bit of their own medicine?

Posted by Matt on February 22nd, 2007

Turnabout is fair play. Anyway conservatives are at the additional disadvantage that so much of their “information” is just factually incorrect. Perhaps Digg has a policy against misinformation.

Or, perhaps, this is just more of the same paranoid fantasies of persecution conservatives are obsessed with, and nothing’s actually going on at all.

Posted by Chet on February 22nd, 2007

so what you’re saying is that it’s okay to behave badly if your opponent behaves badly?

Posted by Matt on February 22nd, 2007

So Matt, you’re agreeing that conservative blogs behave badly?

We can play this both ways, dude. Just sayin’. I don’t hang on many conservative blogs other than this one so i couldn’t tell ya either way.

Posted by DJ on February 22nd, 2007

You seem to be drawing an equivalence between crime and punishment, Matt. That doesn’t make any sense.

Posted by Chet on February 23rd, 2007

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that digg is a corrupt, propagandist, liberal playground.

I was there when the thing started off in 2004; how it blossomed into a fantastic, edgy place to get the latest up-to-the-minute news; and I’ve watched how Bush-hating hippies have degenerated the site into a romper-room.

Some may not like it–but that’s the truth. You want news articles without misleading titles? Skip digg.

Posted by Calvin on August 21st, 2007