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Digg, a political snapshot

Do Digg users favor one presidential candidate over another? Are there attempts to game the social news site, by one set of supporters? Is the so-called 'bury-brigade' censoring political opinion? A look at the last 30 days of Digg's political submissions.
Written by Steve O'Hear, Contributor

Do Digg users favor one presidential candidate over another? Are there attempts to game the social news site, by one set of supporters? Is the so-called 'bury-brigade' censoring political opinion? It's quite possible that the answer to all three questions, is yes.

After it was claimed that supporters of Republican Ron Paul are routinely spamming Digg,  resulting in a 'bury-brigade' campaign against the candidate -- a helpful user has published a spreadsheet which looks at the number of submissions for each candidate, and how they've faired in terms of front page successes and bury ratio, over the last 30 days.

As you can see, Obama has almost twice the submissions of any candidate (841), and a bury-ratio of 11.2%. Ron Paul, on the other hand, has only 113 submissions -- which doesn't really back up the claim of spamming -- and a bury ratio of 41.6%. From this statistic is would be easy to argue that there exists a bury-brigade who have a political bias against Ron Paul.

However, let's take a look at the next set of figures.

Ron Paul has achieved ten front-page stories (minus four burials), compared with Obama's sixteen, with three burials. So whilst Paul does have a much higher bury-ratio, he's had a much better front-page success rate, per-submission.

Admittedly, I've only scratched the surface here. What do you make of the above statistics? Reader observations are most welcome (leave a comment).

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