Alternet has a post about a ring of Tea Party conservatives on the very popular social media site Digg, who are systematically burying posts from progressive sites: Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered.

I have no doubt that this is happening. But why wasn’t Alternet or the left wing blogosphere equally concerned when leftists were doing the same thing to LGF? LGF posts have been systematically buried at Digg for years, to the point where nobody even bothers to submit them any more; there’s no point. Even big stories that indisputably originated at LGF and had no particular political bias, like the Lebanon War Reuters Photoshop scandal, were deliberately buried or marked “inaccurate” at Digg.

I pretty much wrote Digg off quite a while ago as worthless for political topics; it’s regularly spammed by 9/11 Truthers, Ron Paul lunatics, and Alex Jones parrots, and organized teams of grudge-bearing ideologues on both sides work hard to suppress the other side’s stories. I don’t think this is even news.

The utopian ideal of social media is that valuable and newsworthy stories rise to the top; but rather than resulting in a triumph of grassroots democratic value-added breaking news, Digg’s system encourages mob rule, and rewards the people who are the most obsessed.