Massive Digg Rebellion Underway

This is insane, all of the stories on the Digg home page are currently related to the AACS HD DVD encryption processing key that has been cracked. Under pressure from the MPAA, Digg admins removed the original articles and then Digg users started rebelling in protest, burying normal stories, while digging up the HD DVD stories.

It’s a pretty fascinating study of how online communities can react as one massive group. I’m sure Kevin, Jay and the gang are working hard to resolve this issue.

Here’s some more coverage of this situation:

Stuff to Think About

Sex on Life

Wired: Epicenter

Matt Haughey

Ryan Block

Mashable

Speaking of those pesky numbers…

UPDATE: Wow, Kevin Rose makes a bold move to save the day, posting:

“Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0”

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

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.

Digg on,

Kevin

I knew our friends would pull through this one. I’m sure Digg’s response will help put out the fires and make the community even stronger than it was before.