80% of Republicans Choose Abortion When Child Has Down’s Syndrome…(?!)

Well, at least according to the Digg community. Yesterday, a Digger read an article in the New York Times, put his/her own interpretation on the piece, and submitted it to Digg with the above title.

The original piece was about a study done in the U.K., did not mention politics, and was about parents who have tests done to screen for birth defects and the decisions those parents make as a result of the findings.

This Digger somehow misinterpreted the findings of the study to apply to the political parties in the United States, and, according to a large portion of the over 300 comments made on the Digg article, made several errors in both math and logic in coming to the findings represented in the Digg submission.

Many, many Diggers (from a wide range of political perspectives and varying stances on the abortion issue) indicated that they had “buried” the submission as “inaccurate,” because the Digg submission did not represent the findings of the New York Times article, at all.

The story was eventually buried, and a red “possibly inaccurate” flag attached to it, but not before reaching the front page of Digg. It currentlt has over 900 Diggs.

How could this happen?

A few of the commentors indicated that they had “dugg” the submission even with the misleading description, because of the quality of the NYT article, which they felt was well-written. Perhaps this is why the article received so many diggs?

Maybe. But I tend to agree with the commentors that suggested that a lot of Diggers simply “dugg” the story, because the headline appealed to them. They may not have even realized it was not true.

Lesson? Now, we know for sure how to get a story to the front page of Digg. It’s easy – Just say something ugly about Republicans. It doesn’t even have to be true.

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