Infamous forum 4chan is flexing its online muscles, calling on users to manipulate the outcome of Time Magazine’s prestigious Person of the Year honor by voting for Kim Jong Un.
The North Korean dictator is currently No. 1 on Time’s public voting site, beating Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
Threads pushing Kim's nomination popped up almost immediately after Time opened up public voting on Monday, according to the Daily Dot. There's even a catchy nickname for the effort: "Operation: Kim Jong Un for Time’s Person of the Year."
“[L]et's go go go,” one user urged. “[A]nd you don't need vpn or anything like that, it's not ip protected so you can just use the incognito/inprivate/private feature of your browser and keep oppening new tabs with that link.”
Of course, Time editors make the final decision on who will grace the magazine's cover, but the online poll decides who is the world’s “Most Influential Person.”
This is not the first time 4chan has played Time magazine kingmaker.
In 2009, the site successfully voted co-founder Chris Poole, as the World’s Most Influential Person, beating Bernie Madoff, Oprah Winfrey and the president, BetaBeat reports.
There were also alleged attempts to “hack the vote,” the site notes.
4Chan users also hijacked the voting for a free Taylor Swift concert, urging others to send the singer to Boston’s Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
Whether or not 4chan succeeds with Time's poll (voting ends Dec. 14), the big winner here is Kim, who is really having quite the year. The baby-faced leader was recently named the Sexiest Man Alive by satirical news site The Onion, a joke that was lost on China’s Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, which published the news as fact.
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