On the identity of users and the reliability of social content sites

Because of their different uses and different attitudes towards shared contents, I distinguish here, too, between social bookmarking sites and social news sites. I focus on these latter first. What does credibility mean in connection with social news sites?

On one hand, credibility could be understood in relation to the individual entries, articles posted. This is not a simple issue: articles might become popular on a social news website in spite of their lack of credibility – or in fact, because of their total incredibility, their – perceived – blatant lies or stupidity, which then can be mocked, criticized and made fun of. But if this is so, then this fact can be pointed out in the comments attached to the article, and the reliability of the individual articles can be, in the manner I have described in the case of blogs, cross-checked on the internet.

On the other hand, the notion of credibility could be examined in relation to the social news site as a whole, in line with the expectations that such a site should provide a more balanced representation of news than traditional media does (because here the editors – i. e. the audience – have no vested interest in the contents of the site). This does not mean that a social news site is not expected to feature news items from the traditional mass media – but the idea is that a supposedly open-minded and interest-free audience could apply some kind of a filter to the flow of media output, picking out the best available articles. It could, with Dahlgren's terms, act as part of the advocacy media; and this is a way in which social news sites could fulfil a role in the public sphere.

It is the latter interpretation of credibility that I turn to here.

If a social news site wants to be a legitimate part of the advocacy media, then it should reflect some kind of a popular – public – opinion and interest, which in the first place means that entries should be given attention because readers find them interesting, but not because some hidden business interest. Admittedly, this is not always the case – there is for instance no way to make sure whether or not someone is voting for or against an article that (s)he actually read. (See Seopedia 2007.)

Vote rigging – hiring registered users at a social news site to promote certain news

items, making them look more interesting than they actually are – is also possible. Sites such as User/Submitter (http://www.usersubmitter.com) act as intermediaries between submitters (of phoney stories, e.g. badly disguised advertising), and users (e.g. of Digg), with these latter being paid a small sum after each vote they cast on the submitted story.

Digg claims that it is capable of filtering phoney votes (Digg 2007b). On the other hand, according to an experiment carried out by a journalist on behalf of Wired magazine, vote rigging is indeed possible. (The fact that Wired is also tied, through its owner, to Digg's main rival Reddit, does not alter the conclusion of the article itself, it merely suggests, somewhat awkwardly, that Reddit could just as well be hacked.) However, it is expected that once a story gets popular – it receives enough rigged votes to be put on the front page –, and hence it receives a lot of interest, it will finally be up to the larger community of Digg to decide if it can stay there for much longer. And, importantly, most members of this larger community have no vested interest in voting for uninteresting stories (unlike the corrupted voters who helped the story get on the front page). (Newitz 2007.)

Taking a look from another perspective, is it possible for the owners of a social news site to affect the flow of news? It certainly is; as I mentioned previously, it is customary to moderate submitted items in order not to publish anything illegal or offensive.

Besides, in line with the mullet strategy, there might be other reasons as well to restrict the freedom of the editorial community. Having said that, the following case study illustrates that even the owners' own hands can be tied after the users of the site gather a critical mass.

On April 30^th, 2007, a user posted a news item on Digg: a message which contained the encryption key to the digital rights management application of the HD-DVD standard³⁴. Digg promptly removed the story from its site:

We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property [the encryption key in question], that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention. (Digg 2007d)

34 Knowing this encryption key allows programmers to crack the copy protection mechanism of HD-DVDs, and thus to make illegal copies of movies and video games that are burnt onto HD-DVD

However, the news, apparently of great importance to a significant part of the Digg-community, resurfaced over and over again, not only in the form is simple news items, but also in photo montages or disguised in other forms. It became clear that users did not tolerate censorship in this case, even though the Advanced Access Content Systems group (AACS), the owner of the encryption key, threatened to pursue lawsuits against everybody who contributed to spreading it (Waters 2007). Managers of Digg could either choose to face a lawsuit or to lose the confidence and support of their users. They chose the first option: one day after the previous statement, Digg founder Kevin Rose declared in the company's blog that the site is not giving in to the legal threats of AACS.

[A]fter seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. (Digg 2007e)

This example illustrates that social news sites with considerably large readership can effectively tackle the problem of vote-rigging and the unwanted influence of the

"official" editorial staff; the credibility of news items, insofar as they represent points of genuine interest, can be safeguarded. The malevolent, deliberate hacking of social news sites is highly unlikely to succeed in the medium or long run.

But this is only part of the problem. Whether such sites can provide relevant, high-standard advocacy media is the function of the competence and social sensitivity of their users. A user news site might accurately reflect public opinion, or at least topics that public opinion finds interesting, but this does not mean that these topics, or their cited coverage, would constitute a meaningful alternative to the output of traditional media. Or, in Habermas' words, issues reflected upon in user news sites might not be among the "relevant issues" from the point of view of the political public sphere.

However pessimistic this sounds, I do believe that user news sites are a welcome effect of the internet on the public sphere. Reiterating a previous point: their solution is not

"perfect" solution. But they certainly offer an opportunity, what's more, they strongly encourage conducting meaningful, consequential discussion about topical issues.

Slightly different considerations apply for the reliability of social bookmarking sites.

Since the primary function of these sites is to manage one's bookmarks in an easy-to-use and accessible manner, the rating of each other's bookmarks, even if present as a feature of the site, carries no such weight as in the case of social news sites. The underlying assumption is that all bookmarks are relevant, otherwise there would be no point in saving them for one's own use. Therefore, establishing how credible a particular bookmarked site is, is down to individual judgement.

It is certainly possible to hack these sites in similar ways as social news sites, but I downplay the importance of this practice, because here users have no incentive to bookmark links they consider useless. The "front page" or "what's hot" page of social bookmarking sites lacks the "front page quality" of news sites – it is rather just an assorted, random list of possibly interesting things from the web. In addition, the bookmarking of useless links is discouraged by the fact that the more bookmarks one has, the harder it is to organize and keep track of them.

Therefore it can be claimed that the contents of social bookmarking sites represent genuine interest, but without the idea that these contents should represent some kind of advocacy media. These sites are rather a loose gauge of opinion.