Time readers have selected the reclusive leader of North Korea as Time Magazine's "Person of the Year," poll for 2012. Kim Jong Un received over 5.6 million votes pushed by social media site 4chan.
To the surprise of many, how did he win? Apparently, social media site 4chan got a hold of the poll and pushed to make North Korean Leader the winner.
According to reports, about 100 members from the 4chan site used programs to manipulate the actual Time's Poll results. person known as "_js5" swamped the poll with votes for Kim Jong Un manipulating the polling program script. _Js5 emailed many media organizations stating "And I don't know why time keeps running the damn poll where there's no captcha [a program that test if the button pressed are actually human] and it makes it easy for this ting to happen,"
"While we don't make our selection based on the poll results," said TIME executive editor Radhika Jones in a recent interview, added "it's always interesting to see where some of our preferred candidates end up."
Time Magazine did acknowledge both poll results in 2009 and 2012 were influenced by 4chan members.