@ “Honestly, I would think this site would know better than to promote the rewarding of assholes for being assholes.”

New to Techdirt, eh? You’ll find it doesn’t get any better. Not only is Timmy serious here (despite denial), but Mike isn’t hiding some brilliant new “business model”, only trying to justify schemes to grift off value that others produce. — But once you get expectations right, it’s fun to snipe at them, ’cause they think they’re SO clever!

Ok, I thought this was pretty funny but let’s take a serious look at what is going on so it doesn’t appear that the Techdirt community is really as stupid as they are.

-What is the purpose of the contest?

Marketing. Both Taylor Swift and the radio station are marketing themselves. The naive explanation that they are just giving some fan the thrill of a lifetime is BS. That may happen even amid all the marketing and that’s OK. Even the marketing is fine. I mention this because the true motivation is what influences the rules and how the contest is set up.

-The contest was rigged by the radio station!

Look at these rules:

Conduct and Decisions.
“By participating in the Contest, participants agree to be bound by the decisions of Company personnel. Persons who violate any rule, gain unfair advantage in participating in the Contest, or obtain winner status using fraudulent means will be disqualified.”

“If a contestant receives multiple and/or irregular votes from the same user or users, regardless of the source, the Station reserves the right to disqualify the Contestant its sole discretion”

What is an “irregular vote”? It is not defined, so it is whatever the radio station says it is even after the contest is finished. They have reserved the right to disqualify anyone that doesn’t fit THEIR idea of who should win. How is that fair? What if there really was a 39 year old man, who really loves Taylor Swift so much that he dresses up as her in his apartment every night after getting home from work as a longshoreman? Should we disqualify him because he doesn’t fall into the right demographic or society’s rigid concept of proper gender roles? What about his “thrill of a lifetime”?

-How does one win?

A unique URL is assigned to each contestant. A person can vote for that contestant by clicking on that URL but only once per day at most. A single person is identified as such by the source IP address in the HTTP request. These votes accumulate over a period of days. At the end, the contestant with the most votes wins. A “fair” winner depends upon generating a community of supporters. The winning contestant will have the largest set of supporters who religiously vote every day for their biggest Taylor Swift fan.

-How does one win fairly:

These days one clearly must use social media to recruit supporters for a contestant to win. I assume this is considered fair and was a major part in 4-chan/b/ and Reddit’s efforts. How was the contest structured to enforce the fairness of voting within the one vote per contestant/one person/one day regulation? I did not partake in the voting so this is partly speculation but informed by the Reddit discussions. The radio station required resolution of a CAPTCHA, used cookies (maybe, this hasn’t been confirmed) to restrict multiple votes, and filtered multiple votes via identification of source IP address.

-How does one game the system?

1). Opponent disqualification:
You get all the top contestants, apart from your chosen one, disqualified by intentionally violating the rules while voting for the opposition. This was actually discussed on Reddit. The radio station could have avoided this type of shenanigans by simply discarding votes recognized as illegal. Understanding this type of manipulation is important, in general, because any security system can be vulnerable to it (e.g. swatting).

2). Paying off voters:
A contestant, or prime supporter, could buy or extort votes. This particular contest doesn’t seem to have a valuable enough reward to justify such a tactic. Then again, maybe I misunderestimate the appeal to Taylor Swift fans. Oh, but we’re thinking in terms of the U.S. economy when this contest resides on a global internet. What seems a pittance here is not in other countries. The reality of differences in scales of economies across the globe already make possible such, warm body required, things as gold farming and CAPTCHA resolution, so why not votes in Taylor Swift fan contests.

3). Use of Proxies:
A single individual can vote multiple times per day by deleting cookies and using or changing a proxy before voting again. TOR can be used by ensuring that each vote uses a separate exit node. The use of proxies is fairly well understood by teens and tweens to get around parental and school internet filters. 4-chan/b/ & Reddit admit to some proxy use. They also heavily suspect that, at least, the other two top candidates in the contest were also using proxies to stuff the ballot box.
rumor has it that voting on your phone when it is “airplane mode” will act much like changing proxies.

4). Automated voting scripts:
Ideally, a single machine could crank out millions of votes by using a tool like Burp Proxy to alter the source IP address for each vote. This is prevented for most people because ISPs routinely delete packets intended to be sent out of their network that contain a source IP not in the range assigned to them. This may even happen on a finer level by deleting packets sent from your gateway that don’t mach your leased IP address. There are those who aren’t subject to this restriction but the use of CAPTCHA keeps them from automating the voting. I don’t believe anyone involved in this contest was able to get around reCAPTCHA and fully automate the voting. The claim of 500 spambots came from misinterpreting the post on Reddit from one gentleman who claimed to write a script that enabled him to use, through his company, 500 machines throughout the world to vote in the contest. Unless he got around reCAPTCHA he still had to sit there and resolve 500 CAPTCHAs a day (or pay someone in a 3rd world country to do this). I don’t think scripts played a major role in this contest.

The end result from the contest shenanigans is that;
-Both Taylor Swift and the radio station get more publicity than they ever hoped for.
-The 14 year girl who trolled 4-chan/b/ & Reddit into helping her win as “Charles”, still lost.
-Much help was given to those book reading bots that depend upon reCAPTCHA to get them through the hard stuff.
-All those involved in violating the rules of the contest will be prosecuted under the CFAA.