Internet polls are inherently open to abuse thanks to the sheer number of people who can band together to support a joke candidate. But the latest high-profile campaign to influence a result is so intricate it’s tough not to admire it.

Each year the magazine Time puts together a list of the 100 most influential people in the world, decided by its own staff. The list is not ranked in any order.

However, the magazine also conducts a poll among visitors to its Web site, which does have results in order. It’s not unusual for the particular tastes of Internet enthusiasts to show up in these results: last year’s poll was topped by video games designer Shigeru Miyamoto, beating out serial poll-botherer Stephen Colbert.

This year’s winner is ‘moot’, known to his parents as Christopher Poole. He’s the founder of 4chan.org, an Internet forum which has played host to some newsmaking activity including one user claiming to have hacked Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. (A man named David Kernell is currently awaiting trial over the hacking.) It’s also believed to be the origin of the Rick-rolling phenomenon.

Time says it did detect and eliminate some hacking attempts, but believes the poll results are genuine. But there’s clearly more to it than 4chan’s audience running a great campaign. The first letters of the people ranked one through 22 in the final list spells out ‘marblecake also the game’.

Marblecake happens to be the name of the IRC channel (chatroom) used by 4chan to organize protests against the Scientology, while ‘the game’ refers to a philosophical challenge in which players lose the game as soon as they remember its existence. (Apologies to any BLORGE readers who had been playing.)

The site musicmachinery has a detailed explanation of how 4chan members pulled off the prank. It involved figuring out the Web site address which would appear when somebody voted for a particular candidate, then sending out bogus links to this address to trick supporters of other candidates into voting for Poole.

Later the technique was refined to get round Time’s restrictions which stopped any one computer being used to vote more than once ever 13 seconds. At one point, one member was casting around 5,000 votes a minute.

The manipulation also took account of the fact that voters could rate any candidate’s influence out of 100. This rating was combined with the straight ‘votes to win’ to produce the final list. 4Chan members created programs which looked for the highest placed ‘legitimate’ candidate at any moment and gave them the lowest possible ranking to push them down the list.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 12:19 pm under Hacking, Internet.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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