Jason Calacanis, former General Manager of Netscape and CEO of Weblogs, Inc., claims that a number of top Digg users are being paid by PR firms to promote stories to the top page. He’s even offering a $100 bounty to those who can "out the social news scammers." (For those of you unfamiliar with Digg, Wikipedia has a nice rundown here.)
Is it true?
We can be relatively certain users and submitters are gaming the Digg system to make money and get publicity. Services like User/Submitter actually pay users $.50 to Digg three stories, and submitters can pay a flat fee of $20 plus $1 per desired Digg. This becomes an attractive proposition when you consider an investment of a few hundred dollars could rocket your story to Digg’s front page and result in significant exposure.
Fortunately, Digg allows users to "bury" stories that are inaccurate or uninteresting. The sheer number of Digg users, numbering in the hundreds of thousands (just under 500,000 in August 2006, undoubtedly many more now) still offers a great degree of democratic control of what stories make it to the front page, thus garnering the most views.
Since we know, at the very least, there are services that exist to pay users to Digg stories, isn’t this just another form of Astroturfing? I think it’s extremely unethical to pay users to promote stories, but I run into a gray area when it comes to PR firms promoting clients’ products or services by adding them to Digg. On one hand, it is being paid to submit a story to Digg, but on the other, it’s relying on the Digg userbase to promote or bury the story as they see fit. As long as one isn’t paying the users, how is it different from sending a press release to a reporter? I get paid for that, and it’s simply part of my job - However, if I promised gifts or money to a reporter to ensure the story ran, it would be a tremendous breach of ethics for both myself and the reporter in question.
Ultimately, these are the dilemmas we will continue to run into as media becomes more democratized and "social." What do you think? Is it ethical for PR firms to submit stories to Digg and other social media sites on behalf of clients?
Given the amount of networking that goes on behind the scenes to get an item promoted in Digg, I would be loathe to say the regular Diggers are squeaky clean. There’s obviously a lot of e-mails and IMs going back and forth getting people to vote for particular items, no doubt on the understanding that if someone in your network diggs your items, you’ll digg for theirs in return.
So asking or encouraging people to digg something isn’t by itself unacceptable. It’s when you’re offering an inducement, or the item you’re trying to get posted has absolutely no value to the digg readers that they’re likely to get cranky.
I tend to agree, Eric.