Social Media Now: UGC and its Discontents

 Live by the link, die by the link. Yesterday’s Digg user revolt was an object lesson in the power and peril of user generated media.

I won’t give a blow by blow recap of the events–Techmeme is already overburdened by links to recap stories. You can read a first hand account of how the snowball got rolling here; and Danny Sullivan has an excellent wrap up of events at Search Engine Land. What you need to know is that someone posted to Digg a link to the hexadecimal key to cracking HD-DVD’s DRM. Digg pulled the link down, together with several other stories, after receiving a takedown request. Digg users then began bombing Digg with the code in links and by early this morning Digg founder Kevin Rose had capitulated:

But now, after 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.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Social media triumphalists and anti-encryption cyberlibertarians are crowing about a great victory. Duncan Riley’s response was typical:

Will the Digg Revolt of 2007 result in a renaissance in listening to users? maybe, and hopefully it will at Digg, but others should also take note: corporate arrogance towards the user base shouldn’t have a place in Web 2.0, and companies that continue to act in this old fashioned way can now look at a case study of what collectively users can say and do when you won’t listen to them.

Grant Robertson’s was the most ludicrously over the top, comparing the mass postings to Digg with the last great schism in Christianity!

Witness the modern equivalent of the 95 thesis’ Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenburg church. We, digital citizens –commonly referred to by the vulgar term of ‘consumers’ — have had enough of content lock-in. We’ve bought and re-bought entertainment media — repackaged and regurgitated digital vomitus — until we’re blue in the face. We’ve been told time and time again that DRM is for our own protection, and we’re finally and inconsolably fed up.

Others looked for nefarious, conspiratorial motives in Digg’s actions :

Episodes of the DiggNation video show were sponsored by the HD DVD Promotion Group. DiggNation is produced by Revision3, a company run by Digg founders, Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose. Rose is also a co-host of the DiggNation show.

Inside the fishbowl its easy to be seduced by the transformative power of collective intelligence, but history has taught us that the mob mentality can also produce the most dangerous and destructive behavior of which human beings are capable. We’re hardly talking about blood in the streets of Paris following the French Revolution here, but what happens to a social media company if its users get it wrong?

That’s the provocative question asked by Andrew Lih whose excellent blog item is the best I’ve read on the subject this morning:

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

Andrew gives us the relevant text from the DCMA:

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

If the Digg situation results in legal action, Digg’s only defense will be to challenge the constitutionality of the DCMA provision, dicey proposition at best. And it will be interesting to see if all those armchair revolutionaries who posted links and comments will pony up money for Digg’s legal defense–Pete at Mashable proposes taking up a collection.

The industry fall out will also be interesting to watch. Will the Digg fiasco chill investment in user generated content? What about Wikipedia and other sites to which users posted the offending code? Those sites were able to remove the illegal material without being over run. What processes do they have in place that are lacking at Digg? And is there some difference between the communities of contributors at Digg and at Wikipedia that accounts for the fact that Wikipedia wasn’t surrounded by surfers with virtual torches and pitchforks?

Stay tuned.