The article received little attention outside a few tech-oriented blogs—in part, one suspects, because Digg is no longer the agenda-setting monster it was a few years ago, when many establishmentarians saw it as a threat to the editorial functions of major news organizations. That issue has long since been argued and decided, and Digg itself has been superseded by far more popular services such as Twitter and Facebook, which cannot be gamed in the same way.

But the episode raises an intriguing, and disturbing, question, especially coming on the heels of a number of similar incidents. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said (or is famously reputed to have said) that we may each be entitled to our own set of opinions, but we are not entitled to our own set of facts. In a time when mainstream news organizations have already ceded a substantial chunk of their opinion-shaping influence to Web-based partisans on the left and right, does each side now feel entitled to its own facts as well? And thanks to the emergence of social media as the increasingly dominant mode of information dissemination, are we nearing a time when truth itself will become just another commodity to be bought and sold on the social-media markets? Or, to cast it in Twitter-speak: @glennbeck fact = or > @nytimes fact? More far-reachingly, how does society function (as it has since the Enlightenment gave primacy to the link between reason and provable fact) when there is no commonly accepted set of facts and assumptions to drive discourse?

Take an early example of this truth warfare: in September 2009, an estimated 60,000 to 75,000 people showed up on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to protest President Obama’s “socialist” agenda. Unhappy with that reported turnout figure, conservative blogs disseminated a photo showing that there had been, in fact, 2 million attendees. But it was soon pointed out that the photo in question was of another march years earlier, since the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004, was conspicuous by its absence. Most of the conservative blogs subsequently removed the photo and/or published a correction, though the irrepressible Power Line couldn’t avoid a final shot: “Washington Democrats are well aware of how many people turned out, even as their media outlets try to downplay the event.”

Other recent events have forced comparably awkward gymnastics around what is and isn’t true. (I am grateful to the Web site The Awl for cataloging several of them.) Many, but not all, of these incidents involve movement conservatives, who continue to prove savvier than their liberal counterparts about deploying new media (see Matt Drudge, aggregation; Rush Limbaugh, talk radio; Sarah Palin, Twitter).

Last spring, the community-organizing group ACORN disbanded, having been subjected to withering and quasi-racist attacks by Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart since 2008. It did this even though numerous investigations had determined that the main piece of evidence conservatives had used against it—notorious “sting footage” purportedly showing ACORN representatives advising a “pimp” and a “prostitute” (both in fact conservative activists) how to defraud the government—had been heavily doctored. “The evidence illustrates,” California Attorney General Jerry Brown said in a statement, “that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting-room floor.” Just before the group was shut down, ACORN Chief Executive Officer Bertha Lewis explained, “Our vindication on the facts doesn’t necessarily pay the bills.”