Fear in the house of Digg, or The Shadowy Atheist Social Media Agenda Revealed

Here's a new level to the fearsome internet: Digg is a home for attacks on religion, or something like that.  It's the flipside of fearing jihadis organizing online, or worrying about sects recruiting folks through chat and blogs.  Instead, the Web is now a haven for atheists behaving badly.

Actually, it's hard to tell what to fear from this piece.  The article is headlined:

"Anti-religion agenda among social media users"

, but the text doesn't really follow up on that vision.  It focuses largely on one site, Digg, and can't really build up a picture of anything as organized as an agenda.  And there's no sense of just how many social media users in the world subscribe to this agenda.

The "anti-religion" campaign seems to be restricted to satire, at most.

Poking fun at evangelical Christians, Catholics, creationists, the image of Jesus Christ and, well, anything remotely associated with religion is ...

... commonplace on the website. (ellipses in original; a CMS accident?)

So no use of Digg to, say, organize mass conversions of believers into heathenism.  No Digging of "how to hold a Bible burning."  No Digging a Dawkinsite conspiracy to undermine the Vatican. (and no mention of free speech, anywhere in the article.)

The extent of this "agenda"'s effects is hard to determine from the article.  One example is mentioned where a post received "1,000 votes, called 'diggs,' from users", but the number is not related to any other figure, leaving readers with the vague impression that one thousand is, um, a lot of stuff... or something.

Another lame-evidence example escapes Digg for a different social media platform:

YouTube also has its atheist niche. A search for "atheist" yields 124,000 results, and several of those videos have been watched hundreds of thousands of times. Granted, a search for "Christianity" returns 862,000, but many of those contain content critical of the religion.

Again, is 124K a lot in this context?  If the "Christianity"-tagged videos include "content critical of the religion" (imagine that), do the "atheist"-tagged ones also include criticism?  Are these actually comparable search terms? 

For that matter, why does the article reference only Christianity, and no other religions?

In fact, the article offers several simply bizarre assertions.  Early on we read:

For him, time spent in the house of Digg is not unlike a Sunday church gathering. Groups of like-minded individuals share gossip and stories, and they discuss such topics as politics, sports and, yes, even religion.

"not unlike"  are terrific weasel words.  By these lights, Digg is not unlike a... science fiction convention.  Or a bar.  Or a sex club weekend.  Hey, anything is (not un)like a church, or (not un)like Digg itself!

Towards the end appears an even better line, out of nowhere:

The Internet isn't killing religion.

...which nothing in the article even suggests.  But it's a fun thought for stories.

Perhaps such articles won't have traction in the larger discourse of fearing digital technology.  But we note the idea here, for the archives, in case things turn out differently.