A close look at campaign-oriented stories on Digg shows that, in the last 30 days, at least 28 stories critical of GOP Sen. John McCain receive been mysteriously "buried" � meaning enough Digg users have voted against a story that the entry may no longer appear on the site's high-traffic front page.�
Only about basketball team Barack Obama-related stories (positive and negative) were inhumed in the same period.
According to Digg's search results, 10 of the 28 McCain stories were zapped after they had already graduated to the movement page, including several that had received more than 700 diggs.�
The other 18 (all of which had a minimum of one hundred eighty diggs by the time I counted them) stalled out in the site's "Upcoming" section, where stories gain momentum, with the most popular entries finally graduating to the strawman.�
Bloggers who have complained that their submissions were existence systematically interred have postulated the existence of a pro-McCain 'Bury Brigade' � though direct evidence of such a mathematical group is baffling. The political blogger Jed Lewison of the Jed Report has recently had four of his submissions neutralized.� Those entries � none of which portrays McCain in a flattering wakeful, are here, here, here and here.�
"My gut is that it's organized," Lewison wrote of the burial patterns. "Though whether directly with the campaign or not, I've got no idea."�
Lewison pointed to the McCain campaign's recent call to action, in which it bucked up supporters to post the candidate's talking points around the political blogosphere.�
"In my view that's not loose speech," Lewison continued. "They are request their supporters to go and disrupt the flow of the opposition."
But though the pattern is clear � anti-McCain stories are much more probable to be buried � identifying who's responsible is more difficult.� The majority of a Digg's user's actions on the site � including which stories they submitted, voted for, and commented on � are archived and publicly viewable. But information about wHO buries stories is inconspicuous. Any 'Bury Brigade,' whether it's a formally unionised cabal or a group of like-minded, independent activists, cannot be detected by publicly usable means.�
This spreadsheet contains a list of the buried stories I found. In the case of a story that mentioned both candidates, I categorized it according to which candidate it seemed to be singling kO'd. Also, I only counted upcoming stories that had received more than clxxx votes since submission. Below that
