Why is Digg Censoring an Article on Defeating Censorship?
Have you heard of digg? It’s the social news site that lets people “vote” for what should be on the front page. Or, in their words:
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
Digg has quickly grown because of the revolutionary idea of letting users decide what goes on the homepage. But do they really let users select which stories make the front page, or do they censor some articles without reason?
As I’ve seen in the past week, they censor articles without reason.
It started with a story written by a friend on Defeating Censorship. I posted the story to digg, thinking it would be relevant, as there had been a whole lot of news that week on Google’s censorship in China, and the censorship of sites questioning Scientology in the US. By the next day my account was deleted.
I didn’t know it then, but censorship is a touchy topic with the people over at digg. They had been publicly shown to censor articles a few months earlier by the guys over at slashdot.
Now, why would they bury my article and delete my account? The origional article was focused on helping the people of China access information about Democracy. But by showing how to circumvent censorship, we also showed how badly digg was censoring their articles.
The net was meant to be free. As in free speech. People in charge of major amounts of internet traffic should not be able to censor entire portions of the net. Digg is abusing their newfound internet popularity for their own misdeeds. They need to know the users of the internet will not tolerate censorship. If you already have a digg account, start asking why they censor news. Post links to this page, and we’ll build a collection of censored digg articles. I know I’m not the only one.
You can see my buried article on digg here.
Please pass this on to anyone you know who uses digg or believes in freedom of speech on the net!
