«World's Most Influential Person»

According to a poll by Time, Moot is the World's Most Influential Person. Not Barack Obama, or any world or religious leader for that matter. Nope, it's Moot.

Moot is the online alias of Christopher Poole, the creator of 4chan. 4chan is an imageboard, and the spawning ground of many of the internet's memes. Lolcats? They started at 4chan. Rick rolling¹? That came from 4chan. In a way, Moot is indeed the world's most influential person; on the internet anyway. "4chan really does own the internet."

With 16,794,368 votes and a rating of 90/100, I call foul play. There were a few reported attempts at directly hacking the poll, although none were successful. What happened was a more direct approach at manipulating the results: someone wrote programs to repeatedly vote "Moot" on the poll, then ran it on multiple computers (this is known as a botnet).

The entire poll was "rigged" in this manner. The first letters of the top 21 results spells out "MARBLECAKE ALSO THE GAME". Marblecake is the irc channel where the Message to Scientology video originated.

I found a page that details exactly how it was pulled off: Inside the precision hack. As for why they did it? Why else: for the lulz.

¹ A "Rick Roll" is when someone is intentionally mislead to the music video "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. Example: Check out this cool website!