Moot, 4chan Founder, Takes Time 100 Poll

The Wall Street Journal
April 27

The twentysomething founder of 4chan.org won Time’s title of “World’s Most Influential Person” despite accusations that the meme site’s fans hacked the online poll.

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Rick Warren, who came in No. 3 on Time’s “World’s Most Influential People” list.

The founder, Christopher Poole, also known as “moot,” received 16.8 million votes. Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim was a distant runner up, with 2.3 million votes, followed by evangelist Rick Warren with 1.9 million. The rest of the top 10 included Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, Google.org head Larry Brilliant, Attorney General Eric Holder, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, basketball star Kobe Bryant and Bolivian president Evo Morales.

While 4chan is one of the most popular sites for kick-starting viral videos and online trends like Rickrolling, with a self-proclaimed 3 million unique visitors a month, it’s unlikely that Mr. Poole tops the list of influential people in the lives of 16 million Time magazine readers.

It seems that 4chan fans managed to hack Time’s poll, as described by Paul Lamere, who writes software for Apple and was evidently invited to participate in a scheme to stuff the ballot box with millions of autovotes.

Time.com editor Josh Tyrangiel says the hack quickly became obvious, and while they tried to thwart it by removing illegitimate votes and using a captcha system, the autovoting persisted. “Which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that [moot] is the most influential person in the world,” he jokes.

More than 100 comments arrived in response to Mr. Lamere’s blog post about the hack. “This is utterly artistic. While I certianly [sic] would not have voted for moot before this, I will be doing so now. Repeatedly,” wrote user GBM. “4chan really does own the internet,” wrote John.

Another commenter, xhurricane, had a more cynical take. “TIME.com probably doesn’t have a vested interest in canceling those bot votes - since they are now counting that as user activity and will be able to justify higher ad rates to their adverts. Maybe, just maybe, TIME.com got the upper hand in this one and leveraged the power of the rabid fans to artificially increase their value!”

Mr. Tyrangiel says people have asked him if he’s angry about the poll getting hacked, but he thinks it’s a testament to what the Web is all about — that is, who has the most influence or motivation to get so many votes. “As it turns out, Vladimir Putin’s people weren’t as motivated, even though he has more of them, and he probably has greater sway,” he says.

Last year’s poll is an indication of how scientific the results are: Political satirist Stephen Colbert and Korean pop singer Rain topped the list. They may not be as influential as world leaders, but both have hordes of enthusiastic followers.

“We’ll try to secure it as best we can,” Mr. Tyrangiel says of future Time polls, though he adds that he and his staff only have a limited amount of time to isolate bots. In the case of hackers, he says, “it appears that there’s no limit to how much leisure time some people have.”

In fact, yes, he won. The problem is with those who take such polls as granted and even more, shape their value systems according to such evaluations.