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There's something rotten going on at massive social news site Digg. A sprawling campaign of political conservatives working together on secret mailing lists to orchestrate systematic burying of news stories and other users believed to be politically liberal has been uncovered by an investigation published on today on Alternet.

Report author Ole Ole Olson focused on a group called Digg Patriots, which he alleges used a now-deleted Yahoo Groups email list to distribute bury orders for more than 40,000 stories over the past 15 months. In addition to explicitly liberal political articles, "articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets," Olson writes.

Fresh from the official Google blog, we have news that Google is taking a group of online scammers to court.

We've all seen the ads: "Use Google to Make 1000s of Dollars!" "Easy Cash with Google: You Could be Making up to $978 a Day Working from Home!" Finally, the search giant has announced it's going to do something to protect its trademark and help spare a few suckers from getting scalped. Google is suing Pacific WebWorks and a rash of unnamed defendants.

When you think of services offering to get you more fans, followers, and friends on social media sites, a few words come to mind: spammy, scammy, and sad. Purchasing fans is taking the easy way out. Instead of building up a community of followers who actually appreciate what you (or your company) has to say, you can give off the appearance of popularity with a store-bought set of fans. While no one in their right mind will come out and say that the social media "marketing" services that deliver followers and fans are worthwhile, the truth is that many people and businesses are using them anyway, even if they won't admit it. But can any of these services really be trusted?