Online Journalism News

Mob justice rules on Digg

Social news site Digg, which allows users to act as editors by voting for stories, felt the wrath of its own community yesterday.

A story link claiming that a secret HD-DVD encryption code had been cracked was posted to the site. The post included the key code in the title.

After receiving a cease and desist declaration about the intellectual property of the code, the usually hands-off staff at Digg intervened and removed stories that contained it.

The move triggered a backlash among its community of users who, fearing that the site was going against its principle of democratic news selection, resubmitted the stories in droves causing the site to shut down for a time under the weight of the bombardment.

Digg was then forced into an embarrassing turnaround.

Founder Kevin Rose addressed the community in a blog post last night and himself offered the code in the headline of his post.

He wrote: "We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.

"We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

"If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

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