How a female ring leader spun Digg
By Techgirl

Digg.com has been designed to be a democratic news reporting system.  Ordinary citizens choose and recommend stories as compared to the old media system where a know it all Editor and a handful of senior journalists decided what story ideas should be reported and what research got published. Digg is among the top 50 sites in USA and extremely popular in India and Pakistan.

The old system of Know it all Editors and senior journalists driving a site does not work too well.  In my humble view, a Know it all Editor is an oxymoron. On many days, a young girl straight out of Journalism School makes more sense than most of my Editors.  

According to internet monitoring firm Alexa, Digg’s global traffic rank is 116 and each visitors view 7 unique pages per day. It has 25 million Page Views every month.  In India, Digg has an Alexa ranking of 36.  In Pakistan it is 15.

Digg gets most of its traffic from USA.  Among all other countries, India leads in terms of traffic to Digg.

An American Senior News Editor went undercover into an online right wing group ‘Digg Patriots’ to uncover how they successfully promoted conservative news articles while killing many stories with a liberal bias. Tens of thousands of articles sent to Digg were manipulated to affect their rankings with the aim of promoting conservatives view points.

What I found particularly interesting in the report about the undercover operation was that the ring leader of this right wing group ‘Digg Patriots’ is a woman. 

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The ring leader of the group is Bettverboten, who issues multiple digg and bury orders everyday. She is a Digg power user who has dugg 70,000 articles and has 1500 submits of her own (18% have gone popular) in one short year on the site. She was previously known as Lizbett before her lifetime ban for offensive and inappropriate comments, and has two sleeper accounts waiting if she gets banned again at loquaciouslola and MsBoop. She is also on Twitter, although her primary focus is Digg, where she has acquired a huge following of power users who are likely unaware that she is gaming the system, and even calling to bury some of her mutuals.
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In all my years of reporting, I have never seen a woman leading an illegal but successful online group for more than a year!  Have you? Just goes to show that both the sexes are more similar than we think.

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com