Political Activists and Social Networks

Political Activists and Social Networks March 27, 2007

Posted by Todd Zeigler in Blogs, Politics, Public Affairs, Social Networks, Technology, Tools, Web 2.0

My post about the use of Digg by Ron Paul activists attracted a strong response from Ron Paul supporters. In comments on Digg and to my post, many folks acknowledged that they signed up for Digg specifically to submit and digg stories about Ron Paul.

This was already pretty obvious. If you click through on the profile of many users you'll see that all activity centers around Ron Paul. Other users inject Paul-related content into unrelated discussion threads. These folks are pretty clearly using Digg specifically to promote Ron Paul.

I don't think there is anything innately wrong with that. But I don't think it is going to be effective in the long run and may in fact be counterproductive.

Users (like me) are already beginning to resent the efforts of Paul supporters to promote any and all Paul content.

As patr84 said in the comments:

It’s a fact that there is a group of diggers who actively bury any Ron Paul story that is posted, for no reason except that it’s about the guy. I did some research into this a month ago, though things have probably changed since then: http://digg.com/politics/Digg_….._who_s_not

This makes sense. The Digg community is pretty smart and when they see evidence of gaming they are pretty good about correcting the problem. The Paul folks may succeed in getting a few stories to the homepage in the short term but at the long term cost of building resentment from other members of the Digg community.

I think we are going to see a lot more flare ups like this on Digg over the next two years.

My advice to campaigns and activists would be to truly participate in these communities and don't just drop by when you are trying to artificially promote your material. Don't be a bull in a china shop.

Jason Calacanis had a good line about this when writing about a similar problem with ThinkProgress a few months back:

Right now ThinkProgress looks like a spamming group because they are only involved in their own stories. That's like coming to dinner party and only talking about yourself–folks will hate you. Folks will not invite you back to the party. Folks will think you're small and selfish.

7 comment(s)

About this blog

The Bivings Report (TBR) is a source of news, insight, research, analysis and conversation on web-based communications and its increasingly powerful role in the economy, politics and society. TBR content is created, posted and managed by internet strategists, media/communications analysts, web developers, designers and programmers, all of whom are employees of The Bivings Group.

Email Subscription

Search Site

Trackbacks/Pings

McCain’s MySpace Page Hacked » The Bivings Report - March 27th, 2007 at 11:57 am

Comments

Philly Dave - March 27th, 2007 at 11:17 pm

I appreciate your thoughts on this. I did comment on your post at digg and am one of the Ron Paul supporters who joined initially to digg a Ron Paul article. I see nothing wrong with that, but I agree that over time if Paul diggers digg junk the market place will drown them.

On the other hand if other diggers come to see value in the articles about paul and what I believe is the source of the enthusiasm for Ron Pual, you may find that digg is even now, fairly representing interest in a certain area that is not represented as fairly in Main Stream Media.

Again, my compliments on a thoughtfil article.

1 Digg
Tom - March 27th, 2007 at 11:40 pm

When I no longer read any stories on DIGG about Hillary,Obama,Giuliani,McCain etc,I will stop posting my Ron Paul stories. Now, is that fair enough? I think it is. So you better get to work on the people who post these stories,o.k.?
Cutkomp - March 27th, 2007 at 11:41 pm

Haha, you again? You make good and understandable points here, but some things are out of the hands of Paul supporters. That should also be noted, gotta cover opposing angles.

Say, for example, someone really doesn’t like what Dr. Paul stands for, or stands to lose access to millions of free gov’t money. What is to stop that person from creating some accounts(or paying someone to do so), submitting Ron Paul articles, then proceeding to bury them? I may not be explaining myself the best, so I’ll try another way to get my point across. What better way to squash a movement than to control it and make it look bad?

One must consider a lot of things about his campaign. He stands to eliminate a tremendous amount of government wastefulness. I do not put it past some people to use such methods as described above to try and discredit Ron Paul supporters. Like I’ve said before, there is literally no personal dirt on the guy and he’s rock solid on the issues.

I’m just saying, to assume that all you see is honest Ron Paul supporters would be somewhat naive considering the enormous amounts of cash people certain folks would lose access to.
Todd Zeigler - March 28th, 2007 at 9:34 am

Philly Dave – thanks for the thoughtful comment.

Cutkomp – it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were fake Paul supporters trying to make him look bad. You see things like that all the time on sports message boards. Thanks for your comment.

Tom – I hope your dream of a Ron Paul only Digg comes true for you. Good luck with that.
icanoop - March 28th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

I’m sure you have a point that some (a few) people are going out of their way to promote Paul on Digg, but other people (like me) just happen to digg a lot of Ron Paul articles because that’s what we find interesting. You seem to assume that anyone who diggs a disproportionate number of Paul articles is conspiring to do something wrong. In reality, people digg what they find interesting. Ron Paul’s supporters tend to overlap with heavy Internet users (he’s a proponent for Internet freedom) so it’s understandable that he’s getting a lot of diggs. Furthermore, there are few news sources that cover Paul so his many supporters tend to spend their time at the ones that do. I’m sure there are more Obama supporters on the Internet than Paul supporters but they can go to http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/ and find out what Obama or Clinton had for dinner last night, so they don’t need to spend their time on Digg. Maybe 1% of Obama supports spend their time on Digg while 20% of Paul supporters do. Guess what… Paul supporters don’t find Obama articles interesting. Before accusing people of massively conspiring to cheat, try to consider more simple explanations for what you see happening. The Digg process is still working. None of useless Ron Paul spam articles have received a lot of diggs or made it to the front page, only the good ones have.
Gloria - May 8th, 2007 at 9:03 pm

I enjoy seeing Digg stories or any stories on Ron Paul. One thing I enjoy about the Digg stories is that other people like Ron Paul too and want to get him elected… it makes me happy

I prefer it to seeing the new XBox 360 or those sort of stories any day.

The Bivings Report - powered by the Bivings Group