A source other than the Huffington post would be preferable since they have been so discredited this political season with stories like the Trig grandson story, Plumber Joe/Charles Keating story, among others. It might also help Robots.net from sliding into the Digg abyss.

Yeah, I pretty much assume all those extreme right/left political pundits are lying, whether it's Huffington or Limbaugh. They're almost as bad as the politicians themselves these days. But the link in this case was just to the audio of the McCain phone message. If you're worried the Huffington folks edited or fabricated the audio, it's available on plenty of other sites including YouTube. Sounds like McCain (and possible Obama as well) are also running afoul of a Minnesota law that forbids prerecorded calls that aren't preceded by a human operator

Not sure what you mean about the Digg abyss - has Digg moved into politic commentary? Thought they were just a social bookmarking site?

I made up the term "Digg Abyss" to describe what has happened there, and gotten worse this political season. It's ruined the site. The juvenile geeky left has taken over with a never-ending stream of Huffpo, Dailykos and other postings, then used spam bots to digg the stories up. A posting positive of a republican or negative of a democrat can't usually make it to the front page. I'm starting to see some of this even on sites like PhysOrg.

Hey, maybe that SpamBot story is a candidate for robots.net! :)

Ah, sorry, didn't think of the Digg front page, I never use it for anything. I guess several of the social bookmarking sites have a page that shows the popularity of the bookmarks. Reddit and del.icio.us have something similar.

Some people have always used bots to affect the results of unprotected popularity-based results (slashdot polls come to mind). On the other hand, even a properly working popularity contest such as the digg front page is going to reflect the viewpoints of the users. Since Obama is more popular online than McCain (more so than in meatspace I think), it's not surprising that any popularity-based results would reflect that in the selection of popular stories. While I don't doubt there are fake digg users voting for things, I'm not sure they're necessary to explain the results.

PhysOrg is physorg.com? I don't see any political stories at all. Are you just saying they promote stories based on user popularity and you think fake users are skewing the results? That's probably going to happen anywhere you have popularity-based results.

In any case, I don't think this problem can affect robots.net. Our stories aren't affected by their popularity with the users, so fake user accounts couldn't boost their popularity. Even if they could, the trust metric we use effectively prevents fake user accounts from becoming certified, so even if we ran a digg type site, a spammer wouldn't be able to affect the outcome by creating massive numbers of fake accounts.