How Time magazine was manipulated by the 4chan swarm

Earlier this week I wrote about some new social sites to take a look at. One was 4chan.org. It was a bit of a strange one to put in there... hardly anyone I know has heard of it and as pointed out in the comments to my post, some people find the site's content very offensive indeed.

But this week the power of the 4Chan community revealed itself again when it completely manipulated the Time 100 Most Influential People list to such a degree that all of the top 21 ranked people in the Time list spelt out a message from the 4chan community to the rest of the world.

As one of the first reports from a 4chan believer put it:

"What TIME doesn’t say is that their poll was so totally manipulated that the results of the poll are not an indication of who is the most influential, but instead they stand as a monument to Time’s incompetence."

[pic courtesy of MusicMachinery]

At first glance, it seems that in a short space of time well over 30 million votes engulfed the Time poll, sent by 4chan. But what actually happened was that 4chan users hacked into the poll and controlled it completely, but under the radar in a way that went undetected.

I still believe the structure of 4chan as a social site will change the way online communities will organise themselves online, similar to theway that Twitter changed the blogosphere.

Comments

[Kerry Gaffney]

I swore I left a comment on your orginal 4chan post but guess it either got swallowed by your spam filter or lost in the ether somewhere, so this a bit of commentry on that and the recent Time hack.

I disagree that 4Chan is the way the internet will go, it's the way the internet was before the marketeers jumped in and devised the term social media.

It will also be the way the some parts of the internet will contnue to be long after we stop using the phrase social media as it become totally asorbed into the mainsteam.

Such hacks are not new either, there have also been many incidents of various sub-internet culture sites such as YTMND and eBaumsworld having very well organised spats against each other. I'm also thinking of Something Awful and its various forays into SecondLife of Habbo hotel. Obviously this one is far more mainstream than anything else and I'm sure its success will encourage them to do more high profile stunts, if they feel like it - for I think the main difference between 4chan users and propenents of social media is that while the latter are, mainly, creating online to help others, 4chan users are pretty much in it for the lulz.

[Ashok K Sharma]

Information Manipulation (InMani) is modern version of our beloved ancient art and science of Disinformation. On the other side of THIS coin is the propaganda. The manipulations are planned, structured, conceived and implimented in a very hi-tech manner, quite similar to covert spy operations and a lot many modern gadgets are used in it. The computerized manipulation mentioned here is the tip of the isberg.