TIME's Most Influential Person Is...This Guy?

image from extraface

You're looking at Christopher Poole, better known as "moot" on 4chan, and now the #1 most influential person in the world, according to *cough* readers of TIME magazine and TIME online. He "beat out" Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Miley Cyrus by a landslide in terms of total votes and influence score. How did this happen? I must admit, he did start the website that was the home for Rick Rolling and LOLcats, so that did have to count for something. TIME says it was a clean vote, but even the 4chan community says otherwise.

In TIME's article about the victory, they say:

Moot denies knowing about any concerted plan by his followers to influence the poll, though TIME.com's technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote.

But then how do you explain this?

Image from Paul Lamere

First of all, the discrepancy in scores and votes should raise alarms right off the bat. But then look at the secret message: "Marblecake Also The Game". It's not a coincidence. They even documented how TIME tried to break this and ultimately failed at stopping it.

I'm not surprised that something like this happened. I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long for TIME's list to get punk'd by a bunch of hackers. The Internet community beats the large media corporation yet again, to hilarious results.

What does irk me though is TIME trying to put on a brave face and act like nothing wrong ever happened. You know it, we know it and nobody is really surprised by it. Why not just fess up?

In any case, moot stands as TIME's most influential person in the world. Based on the work his community has done in the past, and their work in beating the system here, maybe it was truly deserved after all.