Fake News Story Games Thousands of Digg Users

A Reuters news story alleges that Sony is recalling its brand new Sony Playstation 3 console. Problem is the game's on us. This story is fake and it fooled hundreds of digg users yesterday and arguably thousands more who clicked on the link. You can read how it was done here.

This isn't the first time this has happened and it's not limited to socially driven news sites like digg. The blogosphere widely reported last week that Yahoo had acquired mybloglog after Techcrunch broke the story. An formal announcement has yet to be made.

All of this points to a real problem in the social media world. The only yardsticks we use to measure the trustworthiness of a source are purely based on popularity - e.g. in-bound links, votes, etc. Now often popularity and quality are closely aligned. However, both of these incidents demonstrate that the current system isn't working. We need more.

Someone - ideally a third party we trust - should start a star rating system similar to what works so well on eBay.  It could become a standard the way tags are today. Even if this isn't a big sweeping movement, digg should adopt a similar system and the front page algorithm should take one's rating as well as vote into determining what stories rise to the front page.

(Edelman, my employer, represents Xbox, which competes with Sony.)