Digg Patriots
The Digg Patriots were an online US conservative activist group which shared news stories and opinion articles on the then popular left-leaning social media website, Digg. The group started as an invitation-only Yahoo! Groups email list after Digg removed inter-member Instant Messaging. Using a subscription mailing list service to replace Digg "shouts," members of the group shared links, and requested each other to vote up ("digg") or vote down ("bury") other members' submissions. This generated controversy with allegations that the group was "gaming the system". Controversy A blog post published on August 5, 2010 on the liberal news organization AlterNet with a companion piece in Guardian.co.uk raised allegations that the Digg Patriots were collaborating to censor articles that they perceived as "liberal" using Digg's "bury" feature, and to have "liberal" Digg members banned from the site by reporting their posts for terms of service violations. In the AlterNet report, an anonymous blogger using the pseudonym Ole Ole Olson (Digg user "Novenator") wrote that he had conducted a year-long investigation into organized burying of seemingly-liberal articles from Digg. Olson claimed to have evidence proving the existence of a "right wing bury brigade" organized by the Digg Patriots. The Inquirer explained how