Behind the Scenes: When Robots Attack, Part 2

The year 1999 was a big one for polls here at TIME.com. We shouldn’t have been surprised. Pre-millennial fever seemed to add an extra edge to all the passions that motivate people to express themselves — political tension, national pride, economic disparity, religious fervor — and our polls were chum in the water for those with an overwhelming need to make themselves heard. Make themselves heard they did, turning out in record numbers for our polls, periodically flooding our tiny newsroom with ravenous vote-generating robots, angry e-mails and even threats of eternal damnation. The polls that touched a nerve and set off huge responses gave us insights into the topics that can really motivate a group — or an entire nation. Here are the highlights from a very interesting year in the world of interactive media.

Ask a provocative question, as we did in our Person of the Century poll(we are looking for “that person who, for better or worse, most influenced the course of history over the past 100 years”), and you can expect to get a provocative response. The excitement started immediately — and a clear leader emerged. Einstein? Gandhi? JFK? No, Mick Foley. The day after the poll launched, a robot attacked and cast thousands of votes for Foley, a professional wrestler. What is a robot, you ask? Robots, or “‘bots,” as we call them, are automatic voting programs that come into our web site and vote over and over on our polls. Why do we care about them? Because they ruin the fun for everybody. Heavy robot activity can radically alter the vote tally, slow down our web site and crash other polls unrelated to the one under attack. Just because our polls are unscientific doesn’t mean that we will allow them to become a joke.

After the wrestling robot attacked, we removed the robotic votes and reposted the tallies with Mr. Foley no longer in the top 20. All was quiet for several weeks until a large web site devoted to the grapplin’ game caught wind of the story and whipped legions of loyal fans into a frenzy by misquoting a TIME spokesman as saying that we had removed Foley because “he had made no significant contribution to society.” Needless to say, this enraged wrestlemaniacs the world over, and thousands of angry e-mails flooded in from all over the country. “Time SUCKS!, Foley ROCKS!” and similar messages dominated our mailboxes for weeks. The fact that 99 percent of his votes were generated by a vote-casting robot in a short 12-hour span was lost on the fans, and we had to just batten the hatches, respond as best we could, and weather the storm. It was just the beginning. In June we decided to remove Jesus Christ (as well as the Prophet Mohammed) from the Person of the Century Poll (POC), on the basis that they were not alive in the 20th century. We made the change, posted our explanation, and instantly a e-mail flood of biblical proportions began pouring in. These messages came in two basic categories: respectful differences of opinion and ominous prophecies of doom. Example of the former: “The principle issue here is impact: if people LIVING in the 20th Century have been impacted most by Jesus Christ… then that should be the selection. Of course, on a deeper level, we know He is alive and well today.” Example of the latter: “One day SOON… YOU WILL stand before HIM and desire to get into HIS Kingdom and HE WILL tell you: Just as you have taken me off your poll I have taken YOU out of the Lambs Book of Life.”

Then along came Hitler. When the evil leader of the Third Reich made his way to a top 20 listing, we received a huge number of e-mails demanding that we take him off the poll (especially, many added, since we did not allow Jesus to receive votes). “I don’t want to see Hitler’s face on the cover of this year’s December edition of TIME magazine,” one upset reader wrote. “I don’t think that someone who is directly responsible for the death of millions and someone who taught hatred in such an unbelievable way should be called the ‘Person of the Century.'” As of yet, nobody has written in to tell us that Hitler was great and deserves to win, but we have kept him on the poll, because of the tradition at TIME of acknowledging the newsworthy influence of an individual over world events (both the Ayatollah Khomeini and Josef Stalin have been TIME’s Man of the Year) even if that person is widely considered to be odious.

And then there was the luck of the Irish. In August, a previously unknown soccer player named Ronnie O’Brien shot to the top of the poll when a patriotic e-mail campaign motivated thousands of Irish to vote repeatedly for the obscure sportsman. The voting came in so heavily that it caused the entire poll to crash, and when the digital dust cleared, Ronnie was sitting at number one, edging out Yitzhak Rabin, Hitler and Einstein as Person of the Century. Even though these votes were not robotic, we felt that it was silly to have Mr. O’Brien on the poll — that the votes had been cast as somewhat of a joke — so we picked up the pieces and adjusted the results back to their pre-Irish-deluge level. Immediately after we did so our bulletin boards exploded with angry Gaelic diatribes and calls to “Free the TIME One.” Said O’Brien about the whole thing, “It’s a bit strange. I must owe a lot of people drinks.”

We felt like we needed a couple ourselves, especially after a mysterious “Dustin the Turkey” made an inauspicious run at the number one spot in September. But rather than hit the bottle, we began work on “Botbuster,” a second-generation robot-protection routine for the POC poll that was supposed to end our troubles. Then, when Botbuster was still in testing, Gordon B. Hinckley, the president of the Mormon church, shot to the top of the POC poll in classic robot-driven fashion. A few days later, Botbuster launched and deleted out a large number of automated votes for Hinckley, and he disappeared off the top 20. Another storm of e-mail immediately struck as angry Mormons accused us of bias for removing their leader. But the Latter-Day madness was short-lived, and the steady flow of angry e-mail ebbed once the Mormons realized we were not going to reinstate the invalid votes. Since then, Botbuster has hummed along happily tracking robots and deleting bogus votes, and the POC appears to be coasting into the millennium fueled by votes cast by flesh-and-blood human beings. The only e-mail we have received for weeks has been the daily notice from Botbuster, giving us a tally of all the robotic voting it has successfully kept off the poll that day. One of the most interesting sagas of the year did not involve the Person of the Century, but rather one of our small daily polls operating outside of Botbuster’s protective umbrella. On October 18 we launched a poll asking about the level of concern people had about eating food prepared with genetically modified ingredients. The possible responses: (A) Very concerned, (B) Somewhat concerned, (C) A little concerned, (D) Not concerned at all and (E) Don’t know.

On November 24 we took a look at the log files for the last 12 days of polling and discovered a smoldering cybernetic battleground, in which two groups of robots, one favoring answer A and the other answer D, had duked it out on our servers down in the TIME-Life Building basement to see who could distort the results the most.

Using the IP addresses that our server log had recorded during the battle, we set out to track down the origin of this (every machine that connects to the Internet has a unique address, much like a telephone number, called an Internet Protocol Number or IP address) and discovered that many of the addresses were faked, made-up numbers that a savvy hacker had inserted to confuse our tracking devices. All of the IP addresses used by the A-voting, environmentally conscious machines were either fake or untrackable, but several chunks of robot activity favoring the D (“not concerned”) response showed up in our server with this interesting return address: “gatekeeper.monsanto.com.”

A spokeswoman for agri-giant Monsanto says that their records show no evidence of outgoing robotic activity from their servers during two of the time periods in question. In one case, they saw no traffic at all, and in another, they saw “traffic much too erratic to be the product of robotic activity, and most likely generated by individual employees who feel passionately about the issue.”

Our robot tracking expert here at TIME.com, Andrew Arnold, has a different opinion of the vote patterns coming from the address registered to Monsanto: “Robot voting. No doubt about it at all.” He then explained: “Anytime you see a pattern like this, with blocks of votes coming in very close together, from the same IP address, with the same user ID number, there is no doubt that they are generated by a machine.” Can the IP address that led us back to the “gatekeeper.monsanto.com” be faked? “Yes, it is possible that a very sneaky hacker used a Monsanto IP address [called a “spoof”] and left a fake fingerprint behind on our server log. Given this fact, there is no way to know what really happened for sure.”

Polls are all about reader input, and we try to allow as much leeway as we can to allow our users to express themselves. At the same time, we feel we can’t become the victims of mischievousness or jokery in the vein of Mick Foley or Dustin the Turkey. We can take the criticism for the appearance of Hitler near the top of our poll — after all, he really did have a huge influence on the current era, and our poll is not a popularity contest — but it’s a little disconcerting, as some of our staffers have observed, to have our users imputing wild biases, prejudice and evil intent to us. But that’s part of the New Media scene. While it was certainly trying at times keeping our polls together in 1999, we can only hope that the year 2000 will be as interesting.

The TIME.com poll archive
The Person of the Century Poll