Scandal Strikes Again: Bots Have Attacked the 2000’s Bangers Bracket

*Heavy sigh*

Well, the 2000’s Bangers Bracket is under another cloud of scandal. After last week’s assault on the voting process, we thought we’d cleared everything up by telling you guys to be cool. That’s a pretty all-encompassing rule. It’s not hard to follow it. You just have to not do things like, say, spend an hour or more casting five thousand votes in a Google Form or, you know, spend actual, real-life money paying to have robots vote on an Instagram poll.

At least one of you, though, is not following the rule.

As you can see here, 166 votes had been cast in the championship matchup on Instagram at the time the screenshot was taken, despite the story only being viewed, at that point, 83 times. This is fairly clear evidence of bot usage (I know of no other explanation), and while we don’t know whether a voter paid for the bots or just had them at their disposal, either is a major violation of the rule to “be cool.” Using bots on social media is not cool. Sorry, Russia.

We’ll get to how we’ll handle this, but first, we need to talk through something.

If this was you, please let us know. We aren’t going to block you. We aren’t going to be upset with you. We’re flattered that you care so much, and we’re very curious why you feel so strongly about the 2000’s Bangers Bracket. You seem like you’d be interesting to talk to, even though—and we can’t say this forcefully enough—you aren’t being cool. If you did this, let us know, and if you know who did this, let us know (we also want to know if we’re in personal danger from the perpetrator, because they seem liable to do just about anything right now).

Now, here’s what we’re going to do, both now and going forward:

When Someone Isn’t Being Cool

The nice thing about the Instagram voting is that we can verify votes. We can see who voted for what, check that they actually viewed the story (and therefore aren’t a bot), etc. We also can track pretty well when votes come in, in relation to other votes, so it’s easy to isolate bot votes and adjust for them. It’s also easy on the Google Form to spot oddities, because we have timestamps and we have the number of times the link was clicked from our page, which makes it fairly obvious when someone is voting multiple times (if the thousands of votes don’t give it away). On Twitter, it’s not as easy, but we can spot when a Twitter poll has an abnormal number of votes (we’re a small blog, guys—we only get five or six Twitter votes on some of these things), and we again have some insight into when certain votes were cast.

Whenever any of the three voting platforms are in question, we will react, just as we did last week. For this championship vote, in particular, we’ll go through the verified Instagram votes and tally those up, then adjust the overall vote totals to be proportional to those we can verify. Doing this stinks because it disenfranchises people voting on those platforms (the Google Form and Twitter) where we can’t verify votes, but we’d rather err on the side of more people’s votes counting than fewer people’s votes counting, and right now it appears one or a few people are trying to make only their votes count, which discourages people from voting, drives down engagement and pageviews, makes it pointless to do these pointless-for-the-sake-of-being-pointless brackets, etc. We’re trying to protect the brackets here, because they seem to be a good time for people, and if they stop being a good time, we’ll have to stop doing them.

When We Think People Are Going to Be Uncool

There are some preventative measures we can take. We can require email verification for the Google Form. We can switch our Instagram and Twitter to private while voting is going on. (I don’t actually know if this will work, but I think it will? If it doesn’t, we’ll adjust.) These have downsides: We have to add a privacy disclaimer if we collect emails with the form, we have to give up some impressions and other traffic if we switch our social media to private, etc. So we’d prefer not to do them. But if this keeps happening, or we have reason to believe another attack on the bracket is coming, we’ll switch to this protocol.

***

*another heavy sigh*

Alright, that should cover it. Back to seeing how many dunkers I can fit into a glass of milk. Be cool, guys. And really, please do tell us if this was you. We are very curious about you.