Social networking gets major challenge at Digg

Stan Beer
Thursday, 03 May 2007 06:58

Opinion and Analysis

Kevin Rose knows on which side his bread is buttered. Without the Digg community the site he founded is nothing. However, the events of the past 48 hours show that the social networking phenomenon has run up against its first real challenge - and it's a doozy.

One of the reasons social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace are able to exist is that they can claim refuge from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

YouTube currently has thousands of unsolicited copyrighted video clips posted on its site which is one of the reasons it is being sued by media company Viacom. However, in accordance with the DMCA, YouTube will happily remove any offending clip if asked to do so by the legitimate copyright holder.

The case of Digg, however, is somewhat different. The site is basically an unmoderated forum with no content of its own other than links to content on other sites plus comments from posters.

Digg, which has a subscriber base of more than 1 million, has in effect put an unprecedented amount of power in the hands of its core users, a few thousand regular Digg posters. The Digg faithful get to decide which story links make it onto the prized home page and which ones get buried, along with their comments.

If Digg  was a country it would be a nation ruled from minute to minute by a perpetual popular opinion poll by those who bother to vote. A government that tried to do anything remotely unpopular, even if necessary for the country's survival, would be instantly voted down by the hard core voters and damn the consequences.

Of course Digg is not a country, it is a business and like any enterprise it requires sound governance and adherence to the rule of law. Its founders realized this when they made a decision to remove posts containing a 32-bit Hex code that can be used to crack HD DVD encryption after receiving a cease and desist letter from the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the consortium of companies that oversees DVD copy protection.

Kevin Rose and company tried in vain to make its community of users aware that they removed the posts because to do otherwise would result in a legal suit that could shut the site down. However, the hard core Digg users were not interested in rationality or sound corporate governance. As far as they were concerned, what Digg did was blatant censorship, regardless of the legal consequences for the site. So they kept re-posting the offending code until the site was brought to its knees.

In the end, faced with a hard core user revolt that if maintained would render the Digg site unusable, Kevin Rose and his cohorts relented, publicly reaffirmed their solidarity with the community, and threw their legal fate to the wind. They also issued a fairly insipid follow up statement reaffirming the site's right to remove posts that contravene the principles of use, such as links to pornographic and racist material.

The last point however begs the question of what happens if a community that feels comfortable with contravening copyright laws and site be damned decides that having links to pornography is OK. There is possibly a sizable subsection of the Digg community that believes that censorship of any form is unacceptable.

Having already demonstrated the power of users in such a social networking forum, who is to say that the Digg management would have any more success in curbing a flurry of porno posts from concerned anti-censorship campaigners?

For the moment, however, Digg need not be concerned by such matters as pornography. It's most immediate worry now that it acquiesced to the demands of users who would rather see the site die than stay within the law is how to stay afloat and defend its decision against legal action from the AACS.