Digg.com is many things, but up until recently I didn’t think it was a vehicle for mobilizing the unwashed masses to verbally and electronically harass others.

And yet — that is precisely what’s happened.

The details can be read over here, but basically the story is as follows.  A gentleman felt that he was wronged by a particular lady, as his camcorder disappeared and he thought she was the culprit.  His solution, as an individual well versed in the Web2.0 arts was to post a YouTube video about it, including personal details about the woman in question, and then have it plastered on Digg.

The result?  A titanic level of harassment hereto unseen in the off-line world, resulting in a deluge of threatening emails and  phone calls, to the target of his ire.

You might remember Kathy Sierra’s difficulties after a bunch of well known bloggers allowed comments to run rampant on a particular blog — thereby allowing some nasty sentiments to ferment, eventually culminating in a few particularly nasty remarks and even death threats.

If there was any “Good” thing about it, it was that it lead to an open discussion about the accountability of blogs and blog owners, and what it meant to have a comment policy (at least I talked about it), in addition to the futility of “policing” ourselves with funny badges (Tim O’Reilly, I’m looking at you).

But this — this is something totally different.

Sites like Digg, when they get large enough,  act like an accelerant, or a catalyst, because so many people are reading it any any one time.  Most often, people think of it in terms of traffic — and that’s fine.

But it clearly has the ability to mobilize its users like an uruly mob, for all kinds of reasons, and as the above incident shows, it can get down right ugly.

Is this any surprise that it got as ugly as it did?

To me, it kind of is.

Not because there aren’t enough childish people with too much time on their hands, but because for the most part, the users on Digg tend to be unregistered, vote blindly and without reading articles, and largely disengaged — in that only a small percentage actually participate in any meaningful way.

But if the above *is* true (and I think it is), then I think it says a few things:

1.  Digg’s size is humongous: only a tiny percentage of that large number was doing the harassing, but a small slice of a huge pie is still a big slice by any means.

2.  There are malicioius people who only need an excuse: And because Digg is so large, you’re going to get your fair share of them

3. Digg needs to have a better filtering mechanism: I haven’t heard anything recently about moderators on Digg — mostly because its old news.  They do have them.  There aren’t a lot of them.  They depend on the community to police itself.  The problem, though is that when it comes to posts like this, I think Digg has an obligation to prevent poisonous messages like this from spreading.

Sure, we can get into a debate about censorship and how its evil, blah, blah blah.  And yes, of course there was that whole thing about the linux HD-DVD encryption key. But surely this is different.

Surely revealing someone’s private information with a call to harass someone crosses that line.

[And this isn't the first time that sensitive information was leaked onto Digg either -- last winter, thousands of leaked MySpace passwords made it onto Digg for about 90 minutes, where thousands of people could have seen them., book marked it and linked to it]

You can call it censorship, but I’ll call it taking responsibility for what goes up on one of the largest and fasting growing sites on the Internet today.

I think Digg, or any site, has a responsibility and an accountability to monitor what is said and written.  I think there is obviously a standard of reasonableness that should be there, which is purposely vague, but does make sense — insofar that large sites, such as Digg, clearly have a larger duty to police itself because the potential to spread a malicious message is that much easier and faster.

And it ought to be clear and transparent as a comments policy — so that they won’t be moderating things on a seemingly adhoc basis.

The trouble is that Digg likes to portray itself as an entity that is policed by itself, and would a contradiction to put up a clear moderation policy when Digg doesn’t want to publicly admit that there are moderators.

I suspect that the only time something *will* change is when an absolute disaster *does* occur.

And I don’t mean of the geeky variety where geeks revolt because of some silly heavy handedness around encryption keys and copyright (which are important — but in their own time and place).

No, I mean a situation where someone really does get hurt (or worse), or there is another kind of privacy disaster that makes the AOL data leak seem puny in comparison — not because Digg doesn’t have a moderating system, but because they just don’t do it fast enough, or seem to want to take ownership in acknowledging how important it is to do it.