It looks obvious

I like Digg and YouTube, as the previous post clearly demonstrates, and I’m looking with great interest about the technological and social options they are opening. Both service aren’t only reflecting the trends and general interest but also shaping the public opinion.

Being built on user generated content both of these services apply only minimal control to the actual content, mostly trying to protect from violation of intellectual property  rights.  However the increasing awareness of the ability of these services to effect the public opinion make them a perfect target to a different kind of attack and manipulation.

A while ago I linked to report about how PR agencies trying to effect how their clients being presented on Wikipedia . It seems very easy, mostly when the 2008 will start that such resources will start target Digg or YouTube. What can be easier than paying to several hundred people to click in favor of certain stories in Digg, all of these people will be real and pass the CAPTCHA test with no problem. with only few hundreds votes a PR campaign can control the first page of Digg, and can flood YouTube.

How can we prevent this from happening? What controls can place to prevent such manipulation? I don’t know. But the problem is that I don’t think the people at Digg and YouTube know - trying to solve it during the 2008 campaign will be too late.