4chan Rigs Contest So Creepy Man Can Smell Taylor Swift's Hair
If the Internet has one hard-and-fast rule, it's this: If you're hosting a contest involving Taylor Swift, prepare to have that contest's results rigged by trolls.
Boston's Kiss108FM must be new to the web, because they ran a contest for Taylor Swift fans fully expecting not to have the top-vote-getter be a "creepy" 39-year-old hand-picked by the Internet to win a meet and greet with the singer.
It all started with a post on the infamous imageboard 4chan asking its anonymous users to help Charles "crush the dreams of these girls and give him a chance to make a complete ass of himself by blatantly just sniffing her hair with cameras rolling."
The lulz-seekers obliged, and, with the help of 500 spambots, by early Tuesday morning Charles was sitting pretty in third place, on his way to two free tickets to a Taylor Swift show and a backstage photo sesh with the 23-year-old.
News of the campaign soon spread to Reddit, where users were equally eager to see Charles make his "fat old guy" dreams come true, and within hours, the unlikely Swift fan swiftly rose to the top of the leaderboard, where he remains.
Of course there are still several days left until the official winner is announced.
And the radio station explicitly notes in the contest rules [pdf] that it reserves the right to disqualify any contestant who employ less-than-honest means of enhancing their position.
But 4chan has never been about avoiding disqualification so much as it's been about crushing the spirits of little kids.
Last year, the students of Massachusetts' Horace Mann School for the Deaf were temporarily elated to learn that they had won a visit from Taylor Swift after 4chan rigged another contest.
But the school was subsequently stripped of its prize after it became clear that they had a "helping hand" in their victory.
Taylor Swift and several of the contest's promoters made it up to Horace Mann by donating thousands to their music program, but it remains to be seen if Charles' story is due for a similar happy ending.
